Here's my timeline:

1) run your computer, get free money.... Awesome, I'll do that and sell these worthless "bitcoins" to people who think they are worth money.

2) a few months later, I think they are worth money

3) now I'm trying to get every business to use them

4) hope for all the above to make me a millionaire

5) really believe in the technology and try to promote where best applicable.

6) ASICs announced - ZOMG let's start a mining company with my friends...

I'll let you know when I get to the next chapter in my obsession.

1) The idea of a currency that isn't controlled or regulated by any central service, and therefore isn't discriminatory towards any single user or group of users.

2) The idea that wealth can be transferred thousands of miles in a mere matter of seconds, with practically no fees attached in comparison to comparable services.

3) The idea that I could generate wealth worth believing in, using compute time that would otherwise be idle.


"The" Bitcoin Foundation makes me worried about 1).
ASICs make me worried about 3).

I've made more in bitcoin than I've ever had before

I'm a programmer, i never looked at the code, but it was easier for me to understate how it all works... THE BLOCK CHAIN! its just one of these ideas that you know has value.

so i got 25$ worth with CoinPal ( i had to setup a PP account and wait 5 days for the bank transfer... Oh how i wish i had trasfered more, but i was buying my house THAT WEEK lol... Oh how i wish i had held off buying my house and dumped my savings in bitcoin! ...true story )

watched it go from 0.75$  ( i got in on the very last dip... right as the news "Bitcoin - P2P digital currency and SR!" was coming out   ) and with it the bubble to 32$
... was totally blow away...

I bought more when it dropped.

I bought even more then it started showing signs of going back up

I bought stuff using some the coins. it was FUN! not like filling out a "Verified by VISA" forum.

I paid small amounts to members for helping me with thebitcoinrewview.com ( adding images, deleting dead sites...)

I'm hooked...

I wish this was my story, but this is what I've got:

Feb 2011: Discover bitcoin, buy $10 with Coinpal
Late 2011: Hear the bitcoin hit $30 and then dropped a bunch, figure it's dead.
Mid 2012: Hear it's still alive, and that people are making a decent amount of pocket change mining.
Shortly after: Buy several 7970s and associated hardware.  Mining for a couple months now.
August 2012: Paid for some SC singles
September 2012: Paid for some bASIC 54's
...
To be continued in some other thread either titled "We're All Filthy Rich!" or "It was fun while it lasted" or "Who's barely breaking even?"

Money and it looked promising...

heroin

I stumbled across Bitcoin in may of 2011.  I read everything I could over the next 72 hours, and by the time I finally stopped to sleep I was hooked.  There have been lots of reasons for using bitcoins, so I break them into 3 categories which can be broadly summarized.

1.  Intellectual:  I'm learning from my experiences, and enjoying it. 

2.  Pragmatic:  There are things I can do with bitcoins that are impractical or impossible with other currencies.

3.  Moral:  This was something that was "opt in" rather than "opt out", thus truly voluntary, and any social contract emerging from that state is legitimate to me.

First read about it in 2011 during the 30$ spike, I understood it to a large extent and put it in the back of my mind as the way of the future - unfortunately since it was distributed peer technology I assumed the protocol was entirely unchangeable.
This meant I wrote Bitcoin off on some of the fixable flaws it still has - divisibility and performance mainly.

Probably lucky I did so I didn't buy during the 30$ spike

I got in again when I realized it was the only way a computer program could do finance without depending on human cooperation, something I needed for my bachelors project.

When I started with Bitcoin, I wasn't necessarily hooked on it yet. But once I discovered there was a whole avenue of cool Bitcoin businesses like Bitpay, Casascius, Bitmit, and Bitinstant, I started getting hooked on buying and selling with BTC.