I heard about bitcoin back when each bitcoin was worth like .01 and when a person with a dual core laptop CPU would generate coins weekly. I heard about bitcoins on an e-currency blog. I was using Liberty Reserve and Pecunix a lot at the time.

2+2 poker forum, when full tilt and pokerstars got shut down...
someone mentioned bitcoin and I had to check it out (on google)

that's how I fell in love

Lifehacker in May.  Dorked around reading about it while it was at $7/BTC and then it took off along with the difficulty level!

Read about it in swedish magazine Fokus (article in swedish here).

ditto - that. thread.

then i forgot about it, after mining - i think - two blocks.  can't find 'em, dammit - i go through operating systems like crap through a goose...

but when the google guy released his android app in march, it clicked for me and i've been a miner 49er ever since.

technologyreview.com the MIT science shitbag ad-filled sci/tech site. Good article, but ruined by endless American style ads and corporate promos.
MIT shame on your disgusting harlotry and averice!

Same here.  The 'Bitcoin hits version 0.3' story.  I had some trouble getting started too (TOR/privoxy/blockcontrol related) but stuck with it and generated 5 blocks in a few months with one core of my Intel Atom D510 (the other was F@H).  As with many of the people here in June I 'bought into the hype' and bought some BTC at bitcoinmarket while the value was at an all-time high of 0.012 USD per BTC! (up from 0.008 USD the previous day).  I continued to buy as the price surged upwards to but no longer had the stomach for it when it hit 0.05 USD per BTC.

I'd forgotten about BTC for a good number of months and was reminded of it in April (I think by a friend that I'd given 150 BTC to to get him started) and was totally shocked by the market value.

My favourite bit of my story is when I accidentally entered the total USD I was willing to pay for a 200 BTC sell order but was supposed to enter the price per BTC and my order ended up being filled by the system at a ridiculous 4.5 USD per BTC!  Fortunately, Dustin was able to reverse this 200-times market value bid for me.

I'm an amateur stock/option trader, and I check Yahoo Finance every morning. There was a story on Bitcoin in the top headlines section, must have been in early June because it was right before the bubble.

That story really struck me, and I spent the next week reading all about it. Because I wasn't ready to jump all the way in, I missed the bubble run up to $30/BTC and subsequent crash. My cost basis is currently between $14 and $15/BTC.

I've become a little obsessed with mining, but really it's just an excuse for me to learn about building computers and how to use Linux.

What seems obvious now to me is that the mining and trading communities for Bitcoin have seen a lot of development and maturing. Now it's time for the Bitcoin economy and commerce community to really start developing. Hard to see Bitcoin being successful without that. Anyway, that's my two cents.