I don't really remember when I first heard of bitcoin, probably through an AnCap podcast sometime in 2012 or 2013. I do remember asking a group of workmates about it and the 'one in the know' in the world of hackers dismissed it as a waste of time. I pressed and asked why he thought so, and it became apparent his politics separated his mind from the notion of a non-government currency.

Out of curiosity, I asked him about developing an accelerator for sha256 from an FPGA and he said its being done but is highly inefficient and there were some asics being developed that seemed to work effectively. Then I asked about a scrypt miner. He said the purpose of scrypt mining is to make it nearly impossible to hardware mine because of it being highly memory intensive compared to sha256 and only GPUs were suitable for mining litecoin or other scrypt based cryptos.

This started me down the altcoin road and then after years of taking a break, I followed the typical path of bring orange pilled.