Todd, glad to see you are passionate about it. I'm also passionate to help people build wealth, and gambling with bitcoin is not a sure road to success.
Let's break it down a bit:
1) You avoided my question about the value of bitcoin. How much is a bitcoin worth? Is it a good price at $35k, $50k, $100k, $1 million? If you don't know the value, then how do you know that you are getting it for a good price?
2) All speculative bubbles go up and down, not just up and down once as you wrote. Go check the price chart for the S&P 500 from 1997 through 2005. There were many peaks and valleys along the wway.
The big pop for bitcoin hasn't come yet, so it is still going up. That doesn't mean it won't go down. I actually did hear someone mention gold once, to which I replied it is also not an investment, but rather speculation on a price movement, although much less volatile than bitcoin.
3) Bitcoin is not the underlying technology. It is one of the thousands of competing standards that use blockchain. Other "altcoins" include ethereum, libra, namecoin, litecoin, ripple, and others. As of 2018, more than 800 different cryptocurrencies were worth less than 1 cent as per Fast Company (https://www.fastcompany.com/90179072/over-800-cryptocurrencies-are-now-worthless).
Saying that investing in bitcoin is like investing in "the internet" is incorrect. No one can invest in "the internet". Since bitcoin is not the underlying technology, investing in bitcoin is like investing in the many competing internet companies before the dot com bust, like Pets.com or maybe Amazon.com. But how do you know which it is? If ripple or ethereum become more popular, bitcoin could go to zero. This is even if everything you believe about the future of commerce comes true.
Ask Toshiba how it turned out to lose the race to get their HD DVD to be the standard format instead of blu ray? They lost $1 billion before abandoning the project.
Your bet on bitcoin is a bet that both the concept takes off (which it might) and that bitcoin will win the race versus thousands of other competitors to become the standard format for crypto. It might, but it is a gamble like at a Las Vegas casino those lottery numbers you "just know" will get you the jackpot.
4) Bitcoin cannot become a standard currency unless it becomes much less volatile. Who will buy a pair of sunglasses with bitcoin if the price can change 50% in the next few weeks? No one. So it isn't revolutionizing the monetary system precisely because of its volatility, which is in turn caused by rampant speculation. I read a short article on just that today: https://medium.com/alpha-beta-blog/why-bitcoin-is-not-a-true-medium-of-exchange-33820269f805
I don't have any issue with people speculating with bitcoin or anything else. I do some small amount of speculation myself. I'm an angel investor in a startup e-commerce company in Africa that I believe can take on Jumia and make it big. But I know this is speculation and don't kid myself into using it as part of a plan to get wealthy. There is a good chance that my investment in this startup will become worthless, even if there is a small chance that it makes me millions. So this speculation is only a small part of my overall portfolio. Venture capital and cryptocurrency are not so far apart.
The wealthy can speculate with part of their portfolio because they can afford to lose their entire investment.
Can you?
