My first cryptocurrency encounter

My first encounter with cryptocurrency Bitcoin was in 2013 when the price was roughly 500$. I was reading an article about its origin, purpose, segments, founder, mining, and so on, but I couldn't comprehend a single thing what was that article saying. It was so blurry and overshadowed, so I started digging deeper into the problem. I found solutions, but still not answering anything. What exactly does it mean to "mine" Bitcoin? Do I have to pick up a pickaxe and start smashing my computer with it? Where does the currency come from? Did it appear just from thin air? Something called blockchain is a center of all this, but how can it even work? Well, these were my questions at the very beggining.

The biggest curiosity of mine was mining. Mining. Okey, interesting. So basically we have computers. Computers are entagled with each other through the Internet (considering they are connected). Okey, understandable. Now, when a person wants to mine Bitcoin, he needs to download a mining software, configure it properly for his computer, join to something called a mining pool (well, that time I was visualizing it like aswimming pool :D) and then start mining. The computer power is "drained" to gather some Bitcoins from the network. Wow, hilariously shocking. So I downloaded a miner, configured it (took me approximately 2 hours to set the program properly and I did right after almost 15 tries -,- ), connected to a pool and started mining. I left my computer to mine Bitcoins for a night and when I woke up, I checked the progress and I realized that I mined nothing, even a single satoshi. Nice, my dreams to become a millionaire in about 10 hours were gone. After that I understood, that my computer was not very good enought for mining, so I eventually gave up.

Since that time the fate of this cryptocurrency evolved in a way no one could even imagine. I was afraid of losing my money that I would put in it, so I let it go then. Last year in June, when I accindentally stumbled upon a cryptocurrency associated article I was stunned by the price and evolution of Bitcoin. What could have been if I didn't shit my pants back then?