I'm sorry, but the early early adopters didn't risk much of anything, at 50 cents a BTC you could buy like 100 BTC for like 50 bucks, which is... not much of a risk to me, hell, that's not a big risk for a 12 year old kid who gets a couple bucks for his birthday
Early adopters (as a group) had to build infrastructure (exchanges, stores, the btc client, services, silk road) in order for the btc price to go up. It didn't just magically go to the current rate while people sat on their coins.