Early adopters made a lot of money if they put a decent amount of capital into bitcoin purely because they got in early.
I doubt there's another stock/share/investment that you could buy for 5 USD and sell for over 1000 USD 4-5 years later.
I respect but am also envious of the 2009-10 early adopters.
The key to becoming rich on bitcoin was getting in very early and selling at huge profits.
We can only hope that bitcoin explodes into mainstream adoption and we get rich off it too.
If you read the stories, many early adopters lost a lot of coins due to investments in miners and startups. While they still made a nice buck, it's nowhere near the potential their coins had at the time.
Ironically, most of the people that made a killing in the early days are only those that literally forgot they even had Bitcoin. If they payed too much attention to the price, they all would have sold way too earlier. This teaches us a lesson: Buy Bitcoin and forget about the price, come back in 5 years and you'll not even need to cash out.
if you don't even need to cash out, then use it now to buy your stuff from shops that accept bitcoin, the only difference it that in the future 1 btc will buy you more things, aside from the fact that you are dumping or not
and if you think about it, we could be the next early adopter, it is only a thing of perspective, bitcoin has to reveal many trains yet