The bitcoin ship has sailed entirely, there's really no money to be made off them; save market speculation.  Even that's pointless unless you have a LOT of capital, which no one pursuing cryptocurrencies really has: we're all after the fountain of youth.

I sit around and watch the boards and look for new coins coming out and look for hype, news, and allocate my measly 650 k/hash (7950 & cpu) accordingly.  mined 500k dogecoins before the difficulty and popularity sky rocketed, now I watch the market for them very closely.  I bought a million of them at 26 satoshis, so I'm up quite a bit at the moment.

besides all that I recently purchased the intelligent investor and  security analysis and I am learning everything I can about stocks, options, and futures.  I have a 1,000 dollar stock portfolio which I monitor daily and I've seen some success with my tiny amount of capital.

I think capitalism is a beautiful thing.  All of us have the opportunity to make all the money in the world, all we need is a little bit of capital.  Armed with nothing but knowledge, moderation, and restraint 1,000 can become 10,000 dollars, or even 100,000 dollars.  I would advise everyone to never be intimidated by anything and search out the profit and the money of the economy.  That's what got me into real finance and that's also what got me into cryptocurrencies.