That's how bubbles work and why they are so alluring. Where people get burned is when they confuse that kind of luck for smarts.

Some people also win the lottery. But I would hardly call it a sound investment.

investment is a pretty strong term for what a lot of us did to make money at btc.

I made quite a bit of money by throwing my ex-gaming 4870x2 radeon machine into a closet for a year.

my investment was a few bucks in energy, and an old computer that was going to become e-waste, and a few minutes time.

I got lucky that at the time this was a feasible strategy before ASIC domination -- but this 'investment' wasn't anything like the rest of my portfolio by any means.

Mining can be an investment, if you can stomach the volatility and have a plan to mitigate the risk. But buying a currency with the mere hope that it will go up is just speculation, pure and simple.

Growing tulips isn’t any more of an “investment” than buying tulips… Regardless of whether or not it’s profitable, it’s a speculative endeavour.

It's a reference to the tulip bulb mania.

"investing"