I discovered Bitcoin in late 2009. It really was a totally different time. I guess that in the world of software one year feels like 5 in the real world.
I had spent a lot of time up to then thinking about the e-gold fiasco and the problems of centralization. Loom.cc was an intriguing possibility, but still relied on trust in loom-asset issuing organizations and a central Loom server to keep track of everything.
I surreptitiously stumbled on Bitcoin after relentlessly searching google for topics on agorism and crypto-anarchy. Information was hard to come by. There were zero mainstream references. The FAQ was very limited, but the careful eye would have been able to glean the key pieces that made the system genius: decentralization, open source, voluntary, pseudo-anonymity, predefined supply... The wikipedia page then was very basic (this was prior to the first deletion crisis). The only technical documentation was of course the white paper. Satoshi had just transitioned to the SMF forum.
Satoshi walked freely amongst us then and answered our questions directly. I felt like I had discovered some secret club of cryptoanarchists. Posts were more like a few a day and it was easy to keep up with all the chatter. There must have been less than 100 members on the forum then. After having just read Alongside Night, one of my favorite posts from back then:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.345Mining was easy. All you had to do was download the client and hit generate. No modifications necessary. Because Bitcoin Market had not yet been created, we were without an accessible valuation discovery mechanism. The only exchanger was NewLibertyStandard. He had this really simple ad-plagued website were he offered to exchange BTC for paypal. There was no bitcoind yet, so everything was done manually through email. I think he was exchanging for less than $.0005 per BTC and based his pricing on how much it cost him to generate. He later started selling stickers for BTC, but I don't know if anyone actually traded for them.
It's funny though. When it came to the economics and vulnerabilities of the system, we pretty much debated all the same 'fatal flaws' that newbies bring up now. Watching the Bitcoin economy grow and develop feels like watching a planet being born. Economic growth really is bottom-up and organic.