I remember seeing the term "bitcoin" and the logo since the early days, maybe 2010 or 2011. I could tell it was some kind of internet currency, but I didn't know anything beyond that.
I read an article in wired when it was still really early on. not sure what the price was, maybe even less than $1. I still didn't really understand what it was or how it worked, but I was intrigued and kept it on the backburner in my mind. I sort of got the concept of mining, and I didn't like how the computations were arbitrary- I would have been more interested if they could have been used to cure diseases or find aliens.
I was involved a little bit with the occupy movement in late 2011, on their main NYC website. they had a similar libertarian message against the big banks. their site had many different working groups, and one was dedicated to bitcoin. If I had any idea what bitcoin really was back then, I would've ditched the occupiers and poured $1000 into BTC right away.
in late 2012, I saw that bitcoins were up to $7, and I thought, "huh, interesting." At the time, I still didn't know about the deflationary nature; by then it had already appreciated in value a huge percentage, but the price still seemed "low".
in march 2013, I was finally prompted to research bitcoin, when someone on reddit suggested I pay for a VPN with it. I thought, "why is it important to pay for a VPN with this other currency instead of dollars?" So I did some research, found out about the libertarian ideals and economic principles behind bitcoin, and I was immediately hooked. I became an early adopter right away. By then, the 2nd bubble was in full swing and cheap bitcoins were a thing of the past. If I had only done my research a few years earlier. sigh... oh well, maybe it will go to $1,000,000 :) but at least it's changing the world, whether I personally hold 1,000 or 0.1
