Well... When I was 15 I was trying to invent Bitcoin, and wound up talking to Hal Finney and Adam Back on the Bluesky forum about everyones' efforts to try to invent Bitcoin. And I got there because I got interested in the Freenet Project - a DHT scheme for censorship resistant data publication. I realized pretty quickly that freedom of speech wasn't very useful without freedom of exchange: every political movement needs money to function.

So when I heard about Bitcoin in 2009 or so, I knew I had to get involved. Though it took a few more years after that because I was simultaneously working at a geophysics startup doing analog electronics design, and trying to finish a physics degree... I didn't have a lot of free time.