[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.