Sometimes I worry about the environmental impact caused by mining.
Every time a disruptive mining technology enters the market, the mining equipment the rest of us holds gradually becomes useless and ends up in landfill a couple of years later. There's probably already tens of thousands of PCBs in landfill from us already. x86 or ARM-based motherboards can be re-purposed some of the time, but these ASIC boards cannot.
Mmmmm not quote. You ever been to a computer hardware recycling center? They strip those machines apart, and reuse almost everything out of them. The plastics get melted and reused. The copper gets stripped and reused. The wire insulation gets ground up and repurposed. The silicone gets ground up and recycled. About 98% of any piece of electronics (phones,tvs,computers,miners,etc) are made up of the same dozen or so materials. Why would we dump all of those materials into a landfill, and then mine the earth for more?