I first saw Bitcoin discussed in 2011 and became involved. This was when mining was shifting to GPUs. I soon joined the original Bitcoin forum in June of 2011. In the early days I was mainly interested in mining and posted how to get the various required libraries for Bitcoin to work on certain Linux distros. At that time I was able to mine over 1 BTC a day, ahh the glory days!
I stayed in mining and soon had 50 GPUs on a few dozen machines. I whipped up some simple command code in order to monitor the miners and also change mining setups to work on the most profitable coin. Winter 2012 the house boiler never kicked on due to excess mining heat. The windows had to be opened to keep things comfortable. The introduction of ASICs eventually led to me exiting mining. There were some some early ASIC purchases yet a few very poor choices including CoinTerra and early scrypt miners made me realize it’s too easy to lose money on custom rigs.
I exited mining to focus on the development of blockchain based services. It has been quite an interesting journey and blockchain keeps changing and offering new opportunities.