A year ago BTC was $1000.  What has BTC done since then to warrant being seven times more valuable today?  It could crash to $500.  Then we will really see who is in the BTC game because they believe in the technology.

There is a whole suite of miner software available to you that is free to use (minus the authors fee).  What coin do you want to mine?  Tell us and you will get all sorts of recommendations on what to use.  Also - what graphics card are you using?  Some cards are better suited to certain coins.  You want to mine a profitable coin for your card, then use those profits to by the coins you want to have.

Bitconnect has said they would like to price the BCC coin at $150 on their bitconnectX exchange when it opens.  People may be buying in hopes that they fill follow through.  They have said they would like to make people "whole" with their investments in their lending program by paying them the $363 per BCC coin they hold from their loans; for people who didn't transfer their BCC from the bitconnect exchange already and sell them for huge losses.  Remains to be seen if they will do it.

Market cap a year ago was 16 billion.  Even if it drops 90% from it's high of 800 billion, is still 400% higher than it was a year ago.

Two 3 card rigs are not too less efficient than a single 6 card rig.  And you don't have the added fuss of risers and multiple power supplies.  My 2¢

$1000 invested into the top 20 currencies on 1/1/17, ($50 per coin) would be $64802 on 12/31/17.  People like to call bitconnect a ponzi scheme but tend to not want to apply that critical thinking to crypto values in general.

Their business model is take your BTC, and exchange it for coins they control the value of, then have people also lend them those essentially doubling their purchasing power, then pay people out in fiat .009ish% per day.  All they had to do for all of 2017, is hodl most their assets.  Occasionally paying people out in full.

I have a small investment with them, it's money I've set aside as very high risk.  I also have a small investment in my own mining, some money put in cloud mining and some money that is invested in coins with the intent of holding for a few years.

All of this is high risk, it's riskier then just buying an S&P 500 index fund, or gold.  Some will pay off, some will be a loss.

You would probably pay regular income tax on them.  If you cash in 20K in bitcoin, add that to your total annual income and see which tax bracket you are in.

When all the bitcoins are mined, miners will be paid in transaction fees.  As the number of bit coins rewarded per block found decrease, the fees increase.