- 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 is so low that it can be profitable only if you have huge amount of hardware and live in a place where electricity is cheap.
- 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$. This mean if a person bough Bitcoins in 2010 with just 1$ 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.
- Altcoins: 2011–?
First altcoin — Litecoin was created in 2011 and since then the world has seen tens of thousands 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 a 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.
- 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 the mid 2018, there has been some turbulence in ICO market which dropped the profitability of ICOs significantly.
- What is the next big thing?
What will be the next gold mine of crypto world? The crypto currency industry is still very young and therefore possibility for high profit is still there. Whether you will be able to board the train and rip the reward as early adopter, it’s certain that just by buying and holding Bitcoin or other major crypto currencies you can still multiply your funds within couple of years
Courtesy : Filip Poutintsev