Over the years early adopters of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had a chance to multiply their capital by thousands of times, if they were doing the right thing at the right time. Sadly most of those gold mines are now depleted, but let’s rehearse them anyway.
1. Mining: 2009–2013
Bitcoin mining was very profitable at the beginning. You could easily find a block per day (which had 50 BTC reward back then), just by mining with your home PC. The mining stopped being profitable after the second Bitcoin bubble in early 2013. At the same time, ASIC miners came to market and mining became commercial. Currently, the margins of mining are so low that it can be profitable only if you have a huge amount of hardware and live in a place where electricity is cheap.
2. Buying and holding: 2010–?
After the first Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was launched Bitcoin became available to everyone, though not many knew about it. In 2010 Bitcoin traded at Mt. Gox at the price between 0,05$ and 0,40$. Which means that if a person bought Bitcoins in 2010 with just 1$ they would be worth today $15'000–$120'000. Today buying and holding will not give you tremendous profit anymore, however, in the next few years, the price of Bitcoin is expected to raise more than 100 times so there is still a chance to hit it big.
3. Altcoins: 2011–?
The first altcoin — Litecoin was created in 2011 and since then the world has seen tens of thousands of altcoins. Most of them have died or are basically worthless, but the few dozens of them hit it big. The people who thought they missed on Bitcoin had better luck with many altcoins, such as Ethereum which grew up in price by almost 1000 times, since 2014, as it was first sold for $0,31.
4. ICOs: 2017–?
The golden age of ICOs started in 2017, though some people even call some earlier projects ICOs. Many projects such as EOS, OmiseGo and Binance Coin, brought to their investors ROI of up to 1000%. From mid 2018, there has been some turbulence in the ICO market which dropped the profitability of ICOs significantly.
5. What is the next big thing?
What will be the next gold mine of the crypto world? The cryptocurrency industry is still very young and therefore the possibility for high profit is still there. Whether you will be able to board the train and rip the reward as an early adopter, it’s certain that just by buying and holding Bitcoin or other major cryptocurrencies you can still multiply your funds within couple years.