I'm not sure you're late. There is still at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude growth possible/likely for BTC/Cryptos in my opinion. It is really easy to make mistakes if you're trading. Buy and hold probably still works, but this whole area is high risk. The most likely scenario, for most, is to buy, at the top of a hype cycle, then get depressed and sell when it falls 60%, only to see it eventually triple again in 3 years. Don't put in more than you can afford to lose. Cryptos are a rollercoaster, and they eat shaky-hands alive.
Personally, I only hold stores of value or smart contract platforms. My reasoning is that successful platform(s) needs to be of a certain size as part of that success and their market cap would need to encompass value. That dictates growth ahead.
For tokens like filecoin, it is far less clear to me how to extrapolate their eventual end-state size, and therefore whether they will be worth anything in a few years. Instead of comparing coin market caps, a better comparison might be per-unit AWS storage costs vs. their storage rates * some risk-adjusted probability of network success. I feel like that's not the comparison people are looking at.
You're right about mining--in almost all cases, unless you have free power, or are an ASIC manufacturer, it is a losing game. If you're a believer, the better play is to buy the coin.
Personally, I only hold stores of value or smart contract platforms. My reasoning is that successful platform(s) needs to be of a certain size as part of that success and their market cap would need to encompass value. That dictates growth ahead.
For tokens like filecoin, it is far less clear to me how to extrapolate their eventual end-state size, and therefore whether they will be worth anything in a few years. Instead of comparing coin market caps, a better comparison might be per-unit AWS storage costs vs. their storage rates * some risk-adjusted probability of network success. I feel like that's not the comparison people are looking at.
You're right about mining--in almost all cases, unless you have free power, or are an ASIC manufacturer, it is a losing game. If you're a believer, the better play is to buy the coin.