A sprinkle of realism ...

[eternalgloom]

You definitely have a very healthy attitude towards investing in general, it's always smart to be very critical of something that you do not have experience or knowledge of.

That said, I'd say it's pretty likely that Bitcoin will continue to grow to even higher levels than we are seeing today.
Big investment funds are slowly but surely adopting Bitcoin in their portfolio, they bring billions of fresh marketcap to Bitcoin and they're driving the prices up.

Mind you, this is purely for speculation purposes, if Bitcoin sees massive increase of users also, the price will get pushed up even further and that will also provide some sort of safety net for when investors pull out.

Like with any investment, only invest what you're able or willing to lose, even if that scenario is very unlikely.

[ScotiaInvest]

Thanks for interesting replies everyone.  I feel now is the right time for me to start investing, just need to decide what my approach is going to be re purchasing, wallet type etc.  More reading here I come ...

[Mometaskers]

Bitcoin's value and growth potential could be overall factors of the size of its userbase.

Crypto hasn't yet reached a saturation point where it can be considered fully mainstream. That's where the "buy a coffee with bitcoin" and past push for more mainstream crypto comes from. The idea that there could still be a massive price hike in the value of bitcoin if it becomes more widely adopted. The engineering that went with that campaign in terms of bigger blocks may have been flawed in ways but the underlying financial analysis may have been sound.

Crypto's value could be like the difference between a PC game with a userbase of 500 players and a PC game with a userbase of 50 million players. Being more mainstream could translate to greater revenue, growth and value. If that's true in crypto's case the price could still have plenty of growth potential.

Couldn't have said it any better. The price as well as the uses would definitely go up as the user base widens. OP have every right to be cautious, after all, he'll be entering this at the $4000 per coin rate. Still, provided nothing catastrophic happen, I think it would still grow for a while and he'd still be able to gain some profit.