cryptocurrency is not enough like another gold rush already?
Do you feel that cryptocurrency is still available to the individual as a gold rush?
But the trade, and the price fluctuations aren't over by long, new cryptocurrencies launched daily by respectable instances and companies. So in this way, I still see a lot of 'rush' potential, even today.
And like the goldrush, it was the people selling the shovels and things making the good steady profits. And there are also a lot of hardware things to change/improve on the cryptocurrency market.
there's a lot of money being made in ICO's
It doesn't require any mining to create a token and raise funds. Just copy pasting token contract and crowdsale code (generally on Ethereum), and putting up a website with a whitepaper. The total market cap of tokens is now approximately $10 billion:
Of course, for governments these digital coins are problematic. It's much more difficult to estimate someone's wealth if one keeps coins in more or less anonymous digital wallets. Also, digital coins make it easy to transfer wealth oversees without fees, which is probably something that banks won't like (the usually subtract a fee through the exchange rate), so banks might try to lobby against Bitcoin.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we don't use our conventional bank accounts anymore for payments, but use some ATM card connected to a digital wallet. Again, this would be bad for banks.
A few weeks ago I bought my first digital coins as well for around 12.000 EUR. I expect the value of these coins to still rise quickly over the coming years.
I'd say BTC, ETH, NEO and OMG are safe bets for now.
In the beginning, anyone with a pan/computer could go to a creek/their home PC and pull out gold/bitcoins.
But now, the money's in selling shovels/ICOs/exchanges.
You're not going to outmine a Chinese farm built at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam.
And while it's hard to do, you could try riding the waves of bitcoin, sell when it reaches an all-time-high, and buy during the inevitable correction, slowly increasing how many coins you have without spending any extra money along the way. Bitcoin is volatile enough that it's difficult to time, though, and personally I just buy a little bit every week and hold.
But that's the same in a gold rush, not every person who went to California to pan for gold found anything worth a damn. It's risky as hell, but if you can afford a little risk, and are willing to immerse yourself in the world a bit so you can increase your chance that the risk you take will be a profitable one, you could still make a lot of money here.
And if you can build a service to wrap around cryptocurrency that doesn't already exist or has a bad solution, you could potentially make good money there too. (Sell the shovels, as it were). Coinbase makes a percent every time someone buys or sells coins on their service, no matter what the price is, they don't care, as long as people keep coming to them.
There's also alt-coins that are low enough on everyone's radar that you can mine them, and hope that at some point they catch on, or get targeted for a pump and dump (which I've seen happen for many coins). Just mine coins in it and keep an eye on it and wait until it shoots up in price and sell before it has a chance to drop again. I don't really recommend this, but it's an option.
And finally, ICOs are hot right now. Do your research, come up with an idea that could be funded with an ICO, and take a shot at building a company funded with your own ICO. Stupid risky, but yet another opportunity that clearly some people are taking advantage of and quickly getting a jumpstart on their companies with them.
Just because one opportunity is no longer feasible doesn't mean that all opportunities have disappeared. In fact, there's a lot more different approaches to finding success with cryptocurrencies than there was 6+ years ago, where you pretty much could only mine a bunch of coins and struggle to find anybody who would give you money for them.