I heard about BTC in 2015 from a good friend .who was already work at the time. He and I had often had discussions about the "impending financial collapse of everything" because of what we saw as untenable and non-fixable problems with our current banking model in America.
It was one of these discussions over late night Pizza where he asked me if I'd ever heard of Bitcoin.
"Is that like that Ripple thing you showed me a while back," I asked. "I couldn't get the hang of how that works, which makes me think it's not that viable of a product."
Ripple's bad taste in my mouth initially colored my opinion of Bitcoin, but as he explained what he understood to me, I warmed to the idea. The key differentiation from Ripple was that there was no central authority attempting to profit from Bitcoin, and that it treated itself like a commodity would, with a finite number of units.