This is a somewhat long story.

I started with BTC around 2012, first as a curious, then by joining Slush Pool with GPU mining. It was a good time to mine with CPU/GPU, and I could get around 1.0 BTC. It was that time when the block erupters arrived, and ASICS were still at design level. I crawled through faucets getting some satoshis, played a lot of Satoshidice, and finally discovered the first Exchange in Brazil (will not ad them here, even though I still trade with them).

Then, on July 2013 I had a little bit less than 3 BTC, when I saw at bitcointalk.org [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252180.0;imode] what was to become my doom: a guy(?) called vdragon was selling a batch of BTC Erupters. Those provided more hash power than what I had, with less energy consumption. Lots of other guys were jumping the bandwagon, and I decided to do the same. I "bought" 3 pieces, with a total amount of 2.67 BTC which I calculated would be returned with the new mining power within a couple of months. vdragon was trading them at the market price, and trades like this were happening all the time at the forum.

Needless to say all of us who bought the erupters never received them. We opened a thread on the SCAM forum of bitcointalk.org, but it never went further than it. Some investigations pinned vdragon in either England or Germany, but police couldn't do anything else due to lack of evidence and BTC anonymity.

After this, I exchanged part of the BTC I had left, keeping only a few cents (0,027 BTC - I don't really know why). I shut down my fill node, and kept following on the news, but the mere fact of remembering I was stupid enough to blindly trust someone without previous research kept me away of the BTC scene.

Until last month, at least, when I checked the exchange rate between BTC and BRL. I remembered I had a wallet.dat file, and spent 3 weeks trying every password I have used in my life, until I finally found the correct password. Those 0.027 covered all my losses, and suddenly I saw myself HODLing again. I've watched as much Andreas' videos as possible, read "Mastering Bitcoin" on Github (paper version is on the way), bought a few more cents, installed Mycelium and transferred those 0.027 there. Also, my full node is back online and I'm setting a LN daemon as well.

With this amount, I'm trying my best to disseminate the technology to friends and colleagues, and I can proudly say that since last week there are at least 30 new adopters in the city I live, with much more to come. The most interesting part of the story for those who heard me is when I tell them I was fooled, but this fact didn't affected my belief in the technology and its potential.

I'm back to the game!

TL;DR: Lost 2.67 BTC in a scam, left the community for 4 years, and returned after overcoming the shame of being fooled, influencing people in my city.