I first became acquainted with bitcoin in it's very early days thru a mailing list associated with the ARG Perplexcity.
1 I understood it's potential but I ignored it while I pursued more lucrative ventures. I was re-introduced to bitcoin around the end of 2010 beginning of 2011 while searching for alternative gateways to manage my online poker balances, and I received my first bitcoin (around ten dollars worth). In April of 2011, I woke up, logged into my poker accounts, and was immediately faced with the FBI flash screen announcing that the domains had been seized for violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (every one of my accounts had been disabled on several sites). That scared the hell out of me so I erased, reformatted, populated, erased, and reformatted my hard drive again. (lost my 10 bucks worth of bitcoin)
Time had passed and the feds didn't come for me so I found ways to start playing online poker again. One of the poker networks I was playing on (Winning Poker Network) introduced bitcoin as a payment gateway less than two years ago (wish I would've kept those 15 bitcoin). The particular skins on the network I was playing on still require(d) KYC documents because they were/are primarily fiat based. So, I began looking at some of WPN's other skins that accepted bitcoin, and I found Betcoin.ag. That's when the bitcoin bug really hit me! Wow! Here was a site that was part of a larger fiat based network (larger liquidity <-- that's important) which is strictly cryptocurrency based, and there's no KYC requirements! If you understand the UIGEA, the history of the online poker boon, and US banking, then you'd know that's a really BIG WOW! I'm still saying Wow! Anyway, online poker introduced me to betcoin.ag, betcoin.ag introduced me to bitcointalk, and I've been strung out on the technology ever since. Poker<=>Bitcoin==Awesome
1) Interesting sidenote and connective history: I was first introduced to bitcoin while pondering this Perplexcity problem where the plan was to come up with a method to brute force RC5 encryption utilizing a p2p network client and searching for this guy. <-- Still searching for this guy by the way....it's 1 of the last two puzzles to be solved. He holds a secret passphrase which will be given to whoever finds him. More clues here. If you find him due to my leads, give me shout a out in the credits somewhere please.