Xue Rui first learned about Bitcoin around 2017.
Back in college, he'd run a small side hustle on campus and saved up a bit of money, planning to get a new computer.
But... Bitcoin skyrocketed, and it dragged all the other cryptocurrencies up with it.
Some cryptocurrencies were "mined" using graphics cards.
This caused the price of gaming graphics cards to remain stubbornly high.
On top of that, smartphone shipments had reached an all-time high back then, so RAM and flash memory prices went up too.
And to make matters worse, didn't some wafer fab in Korea catch fire or something?
With all these negative factors piling up, graphics card prices multiplied several times over. An 8GB stick of RAM cost 1,000, and a 250GB hard drive sold for 700...
In the end, for a build that would normally only cost five or six thousand, Xue Rui had to spend a full twelve thousand.
The expense stung him for quite a while, which was why Bitcoin had left such a deep impression on him.
