HN user
I did exactly this to my PC, and it feels almost like new again. I think my i7-2600k might give up soon, but for a seven year old CPU, it is running suprisingly well. 500$ was all I spent altogether for RAM (16 GB Corsair), GPU (GTX 1060 Ti) and SSD (Samsung 500 GB 850-EVO).
I watched a lot of TV and commercials as a young kid on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Disney channels, commercials ranging from baby dolls, batman and Lego. I wanted a lot of the stuff they showed on TV, and I got gifted a lot, but not everything. I come from a middle class norwegian family which meant that we could afford a lot of toys and stuff, but not everything at once. I don't think it influenced me that much, but I certainly tried to influence my parents to buy the crap which I had seen on TV. In retrospective, I wish my parents had said "no" more to the crap I wanted and received, I didn't need it at all and it was all a matter of my parents saying "no" more.
Sadly there is a lot of red flags indicating that this is not the case, they haven't had banking since April so there are no way to deposit funds to them for regular users at least.
Also, one employee from Bitfinex suggested on reddit that Tether is funded by crypto deposit to them and not USD...
If I understood it correctly, futures won't have any actual transferring of bitcoins so it doesn't matter really.
Jed McCaleb left Ripple pretty early and started Stellar instead, which is probably why he is dumping Ripple.