As the musty smell of the Longgang electronics factory warehouse entered my nose, I was on tiptoe counting the GTX 970 graphics cards on the shelf. Sunlight leaking through the tin roof danced on the barcodes of the packaging boxes, and the photo on my father's work ID still showed the youthful face from five years ago.
"How did that little brat sneak in?" The sound of the warehouse manager, Old Zhang's, rubber shoes echoed behind me. I turned around and raised the plastic bag, "Dad asked me to bring the antihypertensive medication." He suspiciously glanced at the plastic bag printed with "Huaqiangbei Electronics Market," and I timely revealed the ink stain on my school uniform's sleeve.
These graphics cards, which were about to be treated as electronic waste, would skyrocket twenty-fold in three months due to $ETH going online. I touched the box on the left side of the third layer of the shelf; the former Wenzhou miner had found high-quality overclockable cards among these refurbished ones, flipping them for sky-high prices on miner forums.
"Little bunny, don’t touch that!" Old Zhang's scolding made me pretend to trip over a cardboard box, my palm heavily slapping on the stack of computer cases in the corner. Inside the dusty Lenovo host, twelve graphics cards glowed like organs for sale—this machine belonged to a miner who defaulted during last year's mining disaster, and was now waiting to be disassembled into scrap aluminum.
My father coughed at the end of the assembly line, still holding that chipped thermos cup. The MP3 motherboard flowing on the assembly line glowed coldly; this factory, which had been manufacturing counterfeit electronic products for twenty years, would completely shut down in three months due to Shenzhen's policy of replacing the old with the new.
"Dad, can those broken graphics cards in the warehouse be bought?" I pulled out the change from my pocket, the coins worth twenty-five dollars and eighty cents jingling in my palm. My father paused twisting the thermos cup, and the tea spread brown flowers on the conveyor belt.
The sound of the belt buckle hitting the metal workbench made me instinctively shrink my neck. Suddenly, a scene flashed in my mind where he swung this Seven Wolves belt and hit my back. "What do you want these electronic wastes for?" His question startled the sparrows on the warehouse ceiling.
I stared at the patch on his work pants' knee, which had been scraped by a hydraulic press last week. "Our information technology class... needs to disassemble graphics cards to learn circuit knowledge." The lie flowed as smoothly as $ETH mining programs, "The teacher said buying teaching materials can earn practical points."
My father was hitting the rusty shelf with a wrench, and Old Zhang immediately jogged over. "Master Lin wants to take a few cards for the students' class, right?" He grinned and rubbed his hands, "These refurbished goods count as waste plastic, eight bucks a pound."
As I dragged the twenty-kilogram graphics card packaging box out of the factory area, the sunset spilled blood-red over the Tencent building across the Shenzhen River. My Meizu phone in my pocket vibrated, and a Binance notification popped up on the lock screen: $BTC The price rose back to 230 dollars.
The musty smell of the rental house in Longhua village was even more pungent than the electronics factory. I squatted in front of the second-hand refrigerator converted into a "mining machine," watching twelve GTX 970 cards flicker on the (League of Legends) login screen. This ten-square-meter tin house rented with the money from game boosting was now echoing with the buzzing of the mining machine.
"Your batch of cards has issues!" The bald owner of the computer city kicked the cardboard box, "The video memory chips are all burnt yellow." He gestured with the cigarette butt on the golden fingers of the GTX 970, "At most fifty bucks a piece."
I pressed down on his hand that was about to disassemble the fan: "This version can be overclocked to 1500 MHz." In his suddenly constricting pupils, I pointed to a special number on the PCB board, "If you don't believe it, try plugging it in to test the hash rate; these cards can run 24 MH/s in the ETH mining pool."
The neon sign outside suddenly lit up, and the sign of the internet cafe "Fast E-Sports" reflected red on his bald head. Twenty minutes later, I squeezed into an alley with thirty crumpled hundred-dollar bills, and behind me came his furious shout: "You little brat, don’t let me see you again!"
The Bitcoin ATM flashed green in the corner of the 7-11 convenience store. I licked the oden soup from the corner of my mouth and exchanged two thousand seven hundred dollars for 0.38 BTC. When the printed paper wallet QR code started to heat up, I knew I was rewriting the blockchain history of 2015.
The day my father discovered the mining machine hidden under the bed, it was pouring rain. He chased me three blocks with a broom, but stumbled when he heard, "These machines can earn twenty bucks a day in electricity costs." When the first Bitcoin deposit notification rang out in the middle of the night, he squatted at the door of the tin house and smoked half a pack of Double Happiness, the glowing cigarette butt flickering, while new mining sites quietly sprouted across the Shenzhen River's financial center.
This article is purely fictional, for entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute investment advice.
Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental (●'◡'●)
