Speaking of Monero speculation, there doesn't seem to be a lot of speculation in Monero
just a nice steady coin with a thoughtful and focused development team with their eyes on the prize - private transactions and fungability. When the approaching 'Great Deflation' in crypto occurs, I predict Monero will be one of the last coins standing..
But I am just speculating
Looking at the all time price chart the other day I realized that no one has really made any money on Monero yet... Well, not crazy 10x or 100x money. As fluffy has said, the primary motivation for this is to be a currency, not get rich, but if we are lucky enough to be the premier private global ledger then we will need to be "inflated" enough to be able to send a billion dollars or two across the blockchain without any severe volatility occurring from someone buying in or selling out.
That can only mean one thing, and the greedy human in me likes it. The philanthropist is keeping him on a tight leash though, and thinking of things like Job Centers for the homeless and pay-what-you-want restaurants.
Early miners?
Very early miners made some (I was one of them), and some very early buyers too, but the price and hash rate of the coin skyrocketed pretty fast, so both were short-lived opportunities and didn't involve that many coins.
Within two weeks of launch it already traded at 0.0017 BTC, and BTC was more like 500 USD, making that a loss today (and for most of the history) in USD terms.
(old OTC thread)dga and his miner optimizing effort made about 100-200K USD, I think (I'm not sure he's ever said how much they made exactly but that was the impression I got).
If you traded on the swings well you could have made a bit of money, especially on the Mintpal pump up to 0.01.
But it is true that no BIG money has been made on this coin yet.
Yes and no. As an early miner on ec2 I certainly made good money. At one point one of the miners had over half the hashrate and a quarter of a mil ec2 bill. The same miner also sold me 30k+ coins at 0.0008 when cryptonote exchange dipped that low. Playing the several swings from 0.001-0.002 that we had plus offloading a nice amount during the mintpal pump has certainly made it a profitable coin to say the least. Big money as in millions ? Probably not. Big money as in 10's or 100's of thousands. Sure. Also depends on if you held btc or cashed out to fiat. 30k coins at 0.0008 to 0.008-0.01 was approx 24btc - 200+btc. Selling that profit at $500 per btc = $100,000.