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.
It's like musical chairs. The last one has no place to sit...ie has a worthless piece of hardware. Food chain works like this:
Mining hardware manufacturer first mines his own cutting edge tech for 2 months
Then sells machines to general public as 'new'
Miners mine for 2-3 months if smart and then sell while the get more for the hardware than the machines can make mining
Low man on totem pole mines for months and (maybe) figures out he now has a worthless hunk of metal
end of story.
Of course, the game changer would be if BTC all of a sudden doubled or more in value.
