Let's distill the reasons why people have made money in bitcoin since 2009.
2009-2010 : inventor & crypto mailing list hardcore guys. made the most money out of everyone, because nobody knew about it
2010-2011 : slashdot readers & hardcore geeks. made the 2nd most money, since nobody else knew about it
2011-2012 : bitcoin begins to leak to some mainstream media (some specialist financial press). risk takers & techno early adopters (not just hardcore geeks). made the 3rd most money in 2011 bubble high of ~$30.
2012-2013 : no bubble, just recovery from 2011 crash
2013-2014 : final biggest buggle. bitcoin makes it big in china and a rally is sparked led by china. bitcoin appears for the first time in the financial times a few days before it's all time high ($1200). at this point everybody knows about it. the main people making money from this bubble were either the remnants of the last few years or newbies in china.
At each stage, it seems to have been the early adopters who made the most. The criteria for doing well has been, find out about bitcoin early and buy & hold. this worked because there were still many people who didn't know about bitcoin, or who dismissed it.
Now, having reached the front page of the FT, everybody in the business + investing world knows about bitcoin. So you have to ask yourself, what other quality or attribute will I need to make money in bitcoin the next time (if there is a next time)? In life in general, if you ever expect to get rich easily you're heading for disaster. Many people in bitcoin have probably learnt that the hard way.
As a conclusion, if you expect to make money from any activity, you have to be doing something that the wider public is not. That includes bitcoin.
Actually the majority of mid-level players who don't have hundreds of thousands dollars in bitcoin, make money when big investors playing the market, where else gives you such a huge potential for growth. The problem is that early adopters of Bitcoin have taken their profits and this has pushed the value down; investors set stops to ensure that they do not lose too much money and therefore have been selling when price drops. This places additional downward pressures on the value.
I believe some of the people who have sold (including myself) will be re-investing in Bitcoin as soon as the price stabilizes but no sensible investor buys in a falling market, and if they do they will probably have to dump again before the price hits rock bottom. What we are seeing at the moment is a race to hit the rock bottom price.
When prices hit rock bottom people will start to buy again and this rush to get back into the game will probably fuel another price boom, however how do we know when the price has bottomed out. I've never bough at rock bottom as it is impossible to know when that is until after it has happened, so basically what we all do is waiting for a recovery and then buying on the upward trend, to ensure we are not caught out by a small price blip and upward trend must first develop and therefore we are not likely to see any substantial upward movement until such time as the price stops dropping.
