>I find the recent popularity of cryptocurrencies very interesting as I spent a lot of time in 2007-2008 studying and researching Bitcoin from the academic perspective of economics (My undergraduate degree).

>In 2008 I downloaded a BTC miner and had everything set up but then never started the machine because I was running folding@home and thought that was a better use of my distributed compute. Doh!

The first version of the bitcoin software was released in 2009, the white paper was published in October 2008.