The e-Waste part is what should collectively anger us, but I'm glad you're able to buy your card.
From March 2018:
Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.
For people clamoring for renewable energy, this is an obscene amount of energy needed to do a single task - mine bitcoin. Which should make it even more obscene that all of that energy is being used for what? The benefit of a few people. Staggering to think how common this is and the article even states a 30 megawatt system is small compared to some of the other sites that are out there.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
Just because a card can’t be used by gamers doesn’t mean the card must be tossed, there are plenty of non-gaming uses such as AI. You’ll probably see an aftermarket for both types of cards.
Also, like regular graphics cards, newer versions are highly prized so one might say that graphics cards as an industry is already all about e-waste. Unless you’d like to buy my Radeon 9800 or my GTX 1070? They’re still perfectly good for gaming… except everybody wants the new RTX ray tracing etc.
This is highly inaccurate, particularly on the used market. People want cards that can handle whatever games they play within their budget. A lot of older cards run tons of games quite well still, especially if you accept lower framerates / resolutions.
RTX in particular isn't actually that coveted by gamers from what I've seen. It's seen as a nice-to-have at best.
Or to run higher resolutions, or to play flight simulator at reasonable refresh rates, etc etc.