How did you discover Monero?

there was a CPU spec mining community few years ago
as in "speculative mining", mining brand new cryptocoins, spending monies on electricity and speculating on the price for "wen listed on exchange" or "wen coinmarketcap"
they were still being traded in a P2P OTC manner before the listings so could also make some monies that way, if the P2P price was skyrocketing and the listing meant price dumping then trading OTC before the listings was the way, sometimes the moon was happening after the listings too and sometimes it never happened so, speculative af lol

the rigs and setups in that community were interesting, like, multiple motherboards & CPU plugged on a single big PSU, no computer case, setups with ATX splitters and whatnot, solar setups, interesting thingies

and then XMR finally was rdy to fork over RandomX, so mined a bit on GPU briefly right before the switch when it was still on cryptonight and then went full XMR maxi with RandomX (while still having some fun solo-mining here and there some XMR forks)

I was looking into cryptocurrencies more generally, heard about Breaking Monero and was impressed by it; Looked obviously distinct from the Bitcoin moonboys.

Before diving in, I read through zero-to-monero (took me a while!) to gain confidence.
Side note, I wonder whether that will be updated to properly explain FCMP++, have yet to find a clear enough mathematical breakdown.

I was messing around during "Covid," buying crypto and learning. Monero caught my eye because the word "Monero" was cool and the orange, white, and grey colors reminded me of $BTC. I think $XMR was $500 at the time. I bought one, and found out it is untraceable, and the rest is history.

read about it in a reddit thread in alt-run of late 2017, bought from purely speculation and trying to get rich. Since then everything I bought went to zero except monero and bitcoin. unfortunately still poor, but now I care less about the price going up and more just want to escape the banks.

I started to actively search for untraceable tokens because it occurred to me that Bitcoin was going to be problematic, then Monero came up in my searches. To me it seemed like a very unique coin and I immediately saw potential, so I bought a bunch. I sold old my BTC and currently only hold XMR.

I can't remember, it probably was mentioned somewhere and I got curious. But I remember it catching my attention for the right reasons.

found bitcoin after some bad investments. found monero after found how bitcoin works. the masses on the darknet are not always right. monero was around and still people recommending bitcoin on tails. and tails still does not have a monero wallet installed by default. not sure why people use tails. being too secure has cost me a lot of money. this forum needs a p2p software category. hope it takes off.

@MTh now operating systems and websites are problematic. :(