I was on PokerProsNetwork back when it was on the Cake Netowrk (site went to crap lately, different story). They had a chat room and this guy ThundeToe was telling me about how he was buying up some high end video card to mine bitcoins. I can't remember how we got started talking about it. Probably he was bragging to me about it and I naturally was curious. I remember him talking about $20 and $30 bitcoins so that puts the date around July 2011.
Anyways, somehow I learned about SealsWithClubs.org (now it's .eu), maybe from thundetoe, maybe through a google search, and I figured, what the hell, this could blow up big. So I was playing their winner take all freerolls every hour. I would stay up late when there were like 6 people playing so I could win 0.05 BTC. Then I used those profits to play the half hourly which had 0.1B or maybe it was .05B Added, I can't remember now. It wasn't long until I had a bitcoin, then 10, then when I got to 50, I was pretty pleased, that being a block reward. I used to say, "I have Fifty Nifty Bitcoins".
I got up to about 96B, I don't think I've hit the 100 mark yet, but SWC is a great place to win bitcoins. I looked into mining and of course I was put off by the capital outlays. I'm interested in trying to buy bitcoin bonds, I want to put some of these BTC to work for me. I was gonna buy a $100 Kroger Gift Card with my BTC but I changed my mind. I really want to reinvest these things somehow. But as far as the bonds go, it looks like a first come first serve thing, and I've missed the boat so far. As they expand their mining operations, I hope to be able to buy some.
Cognitive just released 1400 expansionary shares. They'll be for sale publicly tomorrow at 8:00pm PST!
https://glbse.com/asset/view/COGNITIVE