[throwaway271818]

Where did you get the 100g of e-waste figure from btw? Is that, roughly speaking, the e-waste mass of storage/txn * total number of nodes?

[arcticbull]

Digiconomist [1]. I should have linked it up top, my bad.

Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2].

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X

[throwaway271818]

Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years.

The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)

[ta988]

But is it recycled? From what I understand it cannot be reused as a device, it has to be reprocessed to extract metals and such. So the value is pretty low and losses are high.

[celticninja]

This is a better index and not run by someone with an axe to grind https://cbeci.org/

[arcticbull]

The number you link is 43% higher.