Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips

Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips further in order to stay competitive. Raw materials can be recycled, we're not dealing with finite resources here. Then again it could all just be a bubble, in which case yes there will be a lot of waste but the market will correct itself. The problem is cryptocurrency has real value, it takes real computing power to process and once it's processed it's very secure (therein lies the value) so I don't think cryptocurrency is going away