Many Supermicro server motherboards I've seen place both the BIOS flash chip and the BMC firmware flash chip in a SOIC socket, so that the flash chip can absolutely be removed without desoldering.
Many SSDs transform all-zero sector writes into a simple TRIM/DISCARD to reduce flash wear, so overwriting with pseudorandom data from /dev/urandom is likely more secure.
Base-4 (in the form of PAM-4) is already used for high speed data transmission. But IMO given how "analog" digital signals become at high speed, using anything but binary for compute logic seems like a fruitless battle.
If cost basis was reported to the IRS by your brokerage, you can typically just report the summary total, since the IRS already knows about the individual trades.