What's all this talk about early adopters taking "risk?" If anything, people nowadays are taking more of a risk with current prices of bitcoins.
Early adopter wants 10,000 coins a year ago? he sells someone a pizza.
A bitcoiner these days wants 10,000 coins? he sells his house.
Mining coins was a hell of a lot easier during the early-adopter stage, a lot cheaper too. It didn't require you to go out and buy thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of hardware in order to make 5 bitcoins in a day. Hell, most people would set-up their miners, leave their computer running all night (like most people do here regardless if their mining or not) and probably not even notice that their electricity usage went up.
The stage we're at now is risky. Businesses are popping up every day, people are investing in coins to hold, hardware is being purchased at a value worth tens of thousands of dollars by the sum of all miners, etc. etc. You can't honestly believe that the early adopters took any real risk...
No, it was much more risky because it was much more likely that they would lose EVERYTHING they invested if bitcoin never took off, if an exchange that took USD was never created, if no-one actually setup a store. And the likelyhood of any sort of actual real-world chance of bitcoin succeeding was much much lower.
Now it's more likely that someone starting a business or mining or investing might lose 50% of their money, maybe 75%, but it's much less likely that bitcoin will drop to 0 and they'll lose everything. The flip side is it's much less likely that they'll make 100x or 1000x their investment.
You can argue that even if the early adopters lost everything, they didn't invest much to begin with. But that's like saying that an Angel Investor who invested in Groupon (or faceboot or any other startup) when it was just one guy with an idea is risking much less than the people who buy into the IPO.