I scraped together the little money I have and dove into bitcoin. My ambition is to make money trading altcoins and keep a bitcoin reserve. Can I even make it anywhere starting with such a small amount of money?
If you intend to speculate with such a small amount of money stick to altcoins for a few reasons:
1) Altcoins have given MUCH higher returns than has BTC in the past 12 months. To double your money BTC needs to go to $20K. This is not taking into consideration the high probability of a large correction on the current price. People who push you to buy something at the top care only about their own greed and not the fact that the odds being against you in your timing.
2) You can't spend $25 worth of BTC without losing up to half of it in fees. If you need to buy something for whatever reason, you only have about $12-15 in spending power.
3) BTC is not a safe haven. It's purely a speculative instrument that can fall to $0 just as easily as the top 20 altcoins. What reason would motivate you to have a BTC reserve anyway?