Snobs forget not all of us have many thousands of dollars of disposable income to throw around (ready to lose)
Poor people forget that if they
don't have money to throw around, they can't afford to spend it on things they don't need. Which is often why they're poor in the first place.
I think i hear what you are saying and yeah it's a fair assertion.
But take my situation for example..
I started out with an old CPU and old weak crappy Nvidia GPU
and i tried to mine BTC then LTC and then FTC then on...
I got very little and it took maybe 2 months for me to get 1 single Litecoin.
I was proud the day i had 1 LTC !
Later i was buying 300+ LTC at a time when the price was the highest at BTC-e
flipping them for profit etc
I didn't take food out of my kids mouth nor did i invest 1 single cent in crypto crap.
I rubbed two invisible pennies together to make 3
And no i didn't pay for the electricity mining either.
Believe it or not guys not all of us withdraw Fiat from our bank accounts to buy bitcoin so we can trade.
When i got up to around 12 grand i figured screw it ..i am cashing it all out and spending the money.
Glad i did ..no regrets.
That is 0 cents invested and 12k profit.
And i would have kept trading etc but it was becoming more and more of a problem with exchanges
vanishing with my coins with various excuses.. combine that with i seen a down trend coming i was glad to get out.
For example i stopped back then using BTER because i had 3 or 4 transfers in a row vanish.
And i had to keep emailing them and asking them what is wrong (this was with Max Coin)
I was trying to arb coins.. if i wanted to store them i have a wallet for that.
The only explanation i ever got was.. check your balance (then i would see my coins were there)
This back then was becoming a chronic problem at Cryptsy too.
I can't really recall any issues that bad with Bittrex or BTC-e though.