Bitcoin at the time is heading towards an uptrend and many who have invested a long time ago could as well find themselves making some good profits but then, it’s good to always have it in mind that, the coin remains volatile and your $10 might not be $10 depending on the prevailing market condition which wouldn’t be the case for money saved in the bank but, inflation plays a relative role to what volatility would do to your coin.
Be it as it may, I’ll rather have my money in an asset with potential of giving me some x multiples than have it saved in some fiat bank where the organization profits off it through trading, lending and other means of investment and I just have a little above cents on what is a huge capital.
You need some sort of other skills or knowledge than just how the blockchain works. But that skill doesn't have to be programming. If you are knowledgeable about market finance, you can probably work on investing in cryptocurrency based products, design new blockchain based financial services, that sort of stuff. If you have some experience in IT infrastructure, investments, purchases and economic management you may do good work in mining. And so on. I don't know how sensible those ideas really are as career plans, but they are at least interesting skill sets for some Bitcoin based businesses.
Not so many people really understand how the blockchain works, and it's not a worthless skill, it's just not enough by itself. Find (or develop) another area of expertise that is relevant and allow you to bring real value to a project. Otherwise, you have a risk of just being one more of those “I have an idea, can you implement it for me?” types of people. This may seem like it takes more time (why learn Bitcoin when you’re never going to use it?), but it’s actually a long term time saver. If you learn the basics of Bitcoin, you open the door to understanding other projects and only need to focus on the deviations. Just learning your project’s way of doing things make it harder to know how a sibling technology works, but understanding the common ancestor gives a basis for all project.