I heard about it roughly 3 years ago in 2012 during the first year my gaming pc was born. I was learning about the world of pc hardware and the various things done with graphics cards after hours when they are idle. I got into spending my extra gpu power on Folding@Home which was a big thing on the pc forum I was frequenting and we had a team/giveaways every month for people that supported the cause. Then there was a bitcoin section added and for all intensive purposes it overlapped with the F@H section since there were similar rigs for both (couple graphics cards, motherboard, psu and tons of fans).
I took a few glances at it and read up on what information was available which was pretty vague other than download some client and spend resources on hopefully getting some virtual coins. In my off time I did download the client and get it running to the point of it catching up to the current blockchain. From there I cant remember if I did mine or not but if I did it was using the miner on the client. It was all confusing and I put the whole bitcoin thing on the backburner til 2013ish.
I think Bitcoin was around $140 ish and I do remember debating on whether or not to buy some, mostly because I loved looking at the btc/usd charts and all of the information and news was flowing nicely. I started visiting a few faucets every now and then and messed around watching it hit $1000+. Around November that year I created this account here and lurked reading everything not really feeling the need to post but checking on things regularly.
A month later Dogecoin came out and I learned about the altcoins and how to actually mine. Getting in early I did manage to earn a nice amount of dogecoins each day but I didn't really have much value behind them and it was a nice fun project to mine for at night. After that get really into cryptocurrency stuff, mined a bit, bought a bit, lost a lot, learned a lot, and had fun every moment of it!