In order to get rich you need to get in at a super cheap price like rpietila did. If you want to get rich from bitcoin now, you better have at least 100 BTC and be ready to wait 10 to 20+ years (and by rich I don't even mean rich, but maybe hit your first million). Other than that forget it.
Pretty much true, but it is not always about home runs. A string of solid base hits may suffice.
It also depends on your starting capital, which was presumably ample already (in rpietila case).
Bitcoin was $160-170 as late as Jan 2015, only two years ago.
From $170 to $820 is solid 382%, which is outstanding for 24 mo.
Besides, it all depends on how large Bitcoin becomes (and how soon).
After all, there is or will be only 0.003 btc per ea earth inhabitant (on average).
Having 3 BTC ($2.5K right now) will equal yourself to a thousand people worth of wealth (0.1% earth-wise).
In addition, at some point, I hope that we will be able to earn some kind of interest on bitcoin in bitcoin, not fiat (via LN or something else).
But we are talking about getting rich with a modest starting capital, which also means without risking much. Most of us are regular people going from bill to bill, so we would need tons of base hits to amount anywhere notable.. which statistically not going to happen (long term gambling always means you lose). The logical conclusion is as said before.. luck.
Right now we have the knowledge of cryptocurrencies being a booming market, but the problem is, there are no other contenders that could give us massive gains again like bitcoin, after bitcoin, so...
OK, risto was very bullish of monero when it was, what, 30-40 cents? Did you invest? I did, but then replaced monero with eth and felt smug for a while. Who knew that eth spectacular run would end up (for the moment) in a ditch, while monero zoomed? There was your 20Xbagger or $200K for every 10K invested.
Most people can't invested 10k in a god damn altcoin... get real. And sure, $200,000 dollars is awesome gains, but you aren't still rich, also it would have required that you sell at the peak.
With bitcoin, if you got in when it was worth cents, you still had a ton of margin to sell and still get rich. You could sell at 500 or at 1000, doesn't matter, if you got in early, you are rich as fuck.
With alts we haven't seen those amounts of gains unless:
1) You invested a lot (10k is a lot)
2) You sold at a very specific peak (extreme luck needed)
I don't see it. In any case, lets look at the future and search for other opportunities, we can't change the past. Problem is as we are saying, all alts suck and I don't see any of them delivering 4 figure % gains anymore.