I still remember the exact moment it clicked.
It was the middle of 2017. I was working a dead-end job.
One random night I was doom-scrolling Reddit when I stumbled into a thread about Bitcoin. At the time it was sitting around $4,000 and the comments were pure chaos, half the people calling it the future of money, the other half calling it a scam.
Something about the idea of money that couldn’t be printed by governments or controlled by banks just… hit different. I didn’t understand the technology at all, but I understood the *why*. I scraped together $80 from my next paycheck and bought my first 0.02 BTC on Coinbase the next morning.
That tiny purchase completely changed my life.
I went from knowing nothing to staying up until 4 a.m. reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, learning about wallets, private keys, and why “not your keys, not your coins” actually matters. By early 2018 I was fully obsessed, not because I thought I was going to get rich (though I hoped), but because I finally felt like I had found something that actually made sense in a world that often didn’t.
Almost nine years later, I’m still here. The price has gone up and down more times than I can count, but that original feeling, the idea of financial sovereignty and owning your own money, has never left.
I’m really curious about everyone else’s story.
**When and why did you first get into crypto?**
Was it the 2017 bull run? A friend who wouldn’t shut up about it? The 2020–2021 cycle and stimulus checks? A random YouTube video? Or something else entirely?
Drop your origin story below. I genuinely love reading these.