Sometimes we forget this fascinating industry is only 17 years old. It was on October 31st, 2003 that Satoshi Nakamoto sent the email to a cryptography mailing list with the white paper attached, lighting the spark that started everything.
After a few weeks, on January 3, 2009 the Bitcoin Blockchain was launched and the genesis block minted.
Those who joined during the first days had mining nodes on their home computers to secure the network while mining, Back then, 50 BTC were given away as a reward when mining every block. Here's a video of a young girl purchasing 900.000 BTC in those early days.
Mining has changed a lot, now big expensive computers are needed and you have to join a pool of miners to try to get some income, but luckily, the open source community persists and a few years ago a home miner was developed which you can purchase for a reasonable amount to still mine at home
The price skyrocketing, new projects cloning the original one such as litecoin, hard forks creating new chains such as Bitcoin Cash, impressive hacks such as Mt Gox, the amount of events we have since Bitcoin blockchain was created and launched is incredible. I have been around since 2017 and there is not a single day I do not interact with this fascinating industry. Happy Birthday!
For those wishing to know a little bit more of the story, here's one of the first documentaries back from the early days, they are both very interesting.