Exposure: 8 Bitcoins can scrap an Nvidia graphics card

After Bitcoin’s energy consumption came under the spotlight, the issue of hardware consumption has resurfaced, with a recent report showing that it only takes eight small Bitcoin transactions to generate the waste of a scrapped Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.

MIT research points to “Bitcoin’s growing e-waste problem,” estimating that “Bitcoin generates 30.7 metric tons of e-waste per year as of May 2021. This figure is comparable to the amount of small IT and telecommunications equipment waste generated by a country like the Netherlands.”

The study claims that “on average, each transaction processed on the Bitcoin blockchain generates 272 grams of e-waste.”