HOW DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT BTC

[atomicswan27]

Tell us the story about how you found out about bitcoins and what got you interested in it.

[Tittiez]

Being the idiot I was, back when that bubble/collapse occurred and big news sites were picking up on it, I thought "Hey I can make free money with my GPU!" and I started mining for a day. Got bored and forgot about it.

Come January of this year I remembered the "Bitcoin" and looked it up again, and read in detail. Ever since I'm hooked, I use bitcoins more then I use USD.

[CoffeeCrazy]

I tried to get into this a long time ago, but the lack of resources on it just made it seem so convoluted for a dollar here and there.

I'm feeling like I'm regretting that decision.

[Lethos]

I do a fair amount of programming work, and one of the projects I do for a client is for an online game, so I was doing research for e-currencies, merchant services and secure trading of currency online in general. The client really did not want to use the free to use options like Paypal and google checkout, their reputation for screwing you was well know, but he also didn't like to work with banks for the huge fees. So I had limited options and a lot of research, that maybe fell outside the normal and well known brands that many gaming sites use to discover if their was anything new or interesting out there.

I found bitcoin during all that research, bitcoin is a great project, but I could not use it for this game, it did not however stop me from being involved personally and using it for later projects. I'd been involved with things like SETI and Folding projects for nearly 10 years I think, so I saw a great potential for how it worked as a single currency, that traded just the same all around the world. Almost all my programming work is international (global), so the ideal of working in one currency without huge fees is ideal, rather than having to deal with at least 3, knowing I'm going to get dinged for big fees eventually. It's slow but I am slowly moving more clients over to the idea of paying via bitcoins.

Shortly after finding about bitcoin, I started mining on my laptop and after realising I could make a sizeable income this way, I took a big step and instead of buying more GPU's, I went in for FPGA's to really boost up my hash rate. It worked and provides now an additional income stream and is a regular talking point to other techies and market traders I know.

I might not came into bitcoin really early, but that hasn't changed how it's provided a nice income for me.

[ilich]

I came across BTC about 2 years ago on one of the private torrent tracker's forum - a member posted the tor link to SilkRoad, not a big fan of their products but the whole idea of this currency got me curious, so i started digging and learned more about coins. Since then i was hooked on that concept and started mining, bought additional hardware for gaming shortly before that and realized it could be used to mine coins as well. I was also using the computer's power for Folding@Home with GPU then tried to run a miner and made some money.  Since then i was (still am) is very interested in learning more and more.

[HeavyMetal]

Wow, is everyone here a software developer?

I was reading up on anonymous money transfers in an attempt to find a way to gather and sell precious metals without leaving a paper trail to the government. Bitcoin has some very interesting articles about it. I am exploring its possible use to me.

[Lethos]

Wow, is everyone here a software developer?

I was reading up on anonymous money transfers in an attempt to find a way to gather and sell precious metals without leaving a paper trail to the government. Bitcoin has some very interesting articles about it. I am exploring its possible use to me.

Not everyone, but their is a lot of developers here, since after all developers are the kind of people who created bitcoin, made all the programs, software and websites that makes bitcoin possible in the first place and found it most fascinating, it took a while before other personality types saw it's potential. But they did and I'm happy about that since it's showing it's not just a geek thing and could one day be adopted to a lot more people.

It might always remain a geek thing, but I'm always interested to hear about how others intended to use it, or of course why they got into bitcoin.

[bushstar]

Someone told me about Silk Road. It sounded good as it is only available on the Tor network and uses Bitcoins. I'm always interested to hear about new tech so an underground website using an experimental currency is right up my street.

I'm sure a lot of people got into Bitcoins because of Silk Road. It is the killer reason to get Bitcoins

[jessica23]

I read an article that got me interested.
Loved the idea about a new digital currency so I started reading up on it online.

Still new in it but i've made 0.02608

[cr4zymanz0r]

Earlier last year (shortly before BTC broke $1 USD I believe) an online friend told me about it. I thought the mining concept sounded pretty interesting and I had a powerful ATI GPU so I decided to dive in. While I only came out somewhere around breaking even from the bubble, I did come away with some pretty nice hardware which I use for smaller LAN parties with friends too.

[Koooooj]

Sometime last year my even-more-computer-savvy-than-me friend told me about it, probably after reading about it on the internet.  I happened to have a strong ATI GPU, so I started to mine with Slush's pool.  I had been doing distributed computing since I was early in high school, first GIMPS, then PrimeGrid, MilkyWay, Collatz, and finally LHC and Test4Theory, so I had the hardware to make decent profit.  I rode through the bubble burst and lost a fair amount, though.  At one point after prices stabilized after the burst I got a Radeon 6970, but I lost interest in mining after a while.  Recently I restored my wallet from before I reformatted my hard drive, to find that I have a decent amount of money.  I'll probably grab either an FPGA, or an ASIC if they turn out to be as good as the marketing would have us believe.

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

My first exposure to the word "Bitcoin" was in the middle of 2011 on a (super long, still active) thread over at Ron Paul Forums:

What is with the bitcoin obsession?
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?289898-What-is-with-the-bitcoin-obsession

[FreeMoney]

Summer 2010, love at first sight!

Started buying till I ran out of fiat, now I earn coins directly, but never enough.

[Kegels]

a message board that I frequent kept talking about the Silk Road. That didn't thrill me, but hearing them talk about the bitcoins and how it works just got me interested in it. I know less than nothing about how economics work and the like, but I"m reading and watching. Some things are a little daunting, but overall it is very interesting and I can't wait to buy my first bitcoins.

[DannyHamilton]

Back in February, someone on /b/ was asking a question about how long it takes the first time you try to get something called a "blockchain".  I crew on a racing sail boat and we have "blocks" (Essentially what a sailor calls a pulley), and chain (connected to the anchor).   My first thought was that they must be asking about some specially designed pulley and chain system.  That didn't really make sense, so I used my favorite internet search engine to search for blockchain to see what it actually was.  I ended up with a bunch of links talking about "bitcoin" and referring to it as a digital currency.  This sparked my curiosity.  I really just wanted to understand all the details of how it supposedly worked.  The more I dug into it, the more questions I had.  For a few weeks it was a vicious cycle of searching for answers to questions, only to turn up more questions.  After a while, I managed to make my way through the mis-information, and mis-understandings that many people had, and found enough valid facts to get to a level of understanding that finally satisfied my curiosity.

At this point, I haven't exchanged any fiat for bitcoin, I haven't purchased a GPU to try mining, and I haven't sold anything for bitcoin.  It's mostly a really interesting novelty to me still.  I see its potential, but I'm the type of person who doesn't jump quickly into something new when it involves money.  It takes me a year or more to commit to buying a new car that I want, and many months to finally commit to the purchase of a new computer.  I'm likely to get involved in the bitcoin economy sometime in 2013. Until then, I'll continue to read about it and keep up to date on any new developments.  Slowly the logical side of my brain will chip away at the wall the emotional side puts up, until I can convince myself to give it a go.

[robocoin]

To be honest, I read about a "Mining Botnet" on heise.de earlier this year. Wth? Cleared that up and barely burning my GPUs since than^^ Sucking up every news article, reddit and what not. And watching mtgox and blockchain like a obstetrician-gynecologist

[WebsterXC]

One of the guys I worked with actually dropped over 2 grand in parts for bitcoining. ASRock Extreme 7 board and 4, 7970 cards. Over 2 Gigahashes. He's calculated that it'll take only 6-7ish months to pay off his computer at that rate, and from there it's pure profit. He pays flat rate for electricity where he lives, so he's good to go.

Basically after learning this, I started running a client on my little 6870 card, and am now in the market for a 6990 that will serve for a little extra cash when I go off to college. Can't go wrong with Dual GPU =)

[atomicswan27]

How much have you guys invested in btc?

[HeavyMetal]

How much have you guys invested in btc?

100 *billion* dollars

[tigar]

I found out about it when looking for a way to have some extra income from ads that weren't an annoyance(As we all hate those ads) and fitted in with my little small unknown forum its theme and came across anonymousads and saw that they worked only with bitcoins so started to look into what bitcoin actually was as their way of showing ads was the way i wanted the ads on my forum to be and in the end i kinda got hooked on the whole idea of using bitcoins for things