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Correct. Trying to come in now and make wealth based on trading on the little ups and downs off day to day ups and downs, is very difficult. It is not something I'd recommend to anyone. Unless you have at least a good system should one attempt that, but even then they can still get reckt as you say.
This is opposed to the easier method, which is getting more difficult to do as time passes. ... That being, if a newbie had entered into the bitcoin system say ten years ago, they could have made 1,000 to 10,000 times their investment. But, getting in now they may see a 10 times, or waiting a little longer, a 100 times on their investment. ... If investing to make wealth is all they had in mind.
But there are other newbies that can get in now that can do even better, without going down the path of investing. That is, they can take advantage of bitcoin's properties to make bank. For example, someone could start up a remittance business between the US and Colombia, or between the US and Thailand, or wherever. Or, they can get into any other number of businesses popping up.
These are the ideas, the topics, that seem to elude the OP.
And then there are the other opportunities that will eventually pop up in the future. There will be layers on top of the bitcoin system, things that no one has come up with yet.
I recall using the internet back around the early 1990's when mosaic came out. I used to like using a web search utility called "webcrawler". It worked well, and I thought it was great and a useful idea to help me with my web searches. ... Then one day, during one of my computer classes back then, these two guys walked into the lecture hall and gave us a short preview of their new web search engine. I think they mentioned that they were from some university out east, or was it the west coast, hehe. They described a new algorithm for how to tie a search term to a page's contents. Then they showed us their webpage, it was a white blank page with just one entry box and couple of buttons. They called it "Google". ... When I went to the lab, I tried it, and I liked it because it had no clutter, no ads on the main page. I thought wow, what a great idea.
No one really knows what's coming.
There are quite a few folks who are describing bitcoin's current addressable market (meaning currencies, currency derivatives and various ways that value is stored that goes beyond the actual value of the asset) in today's dollars is somewhere between $500 Trillion and $900 Trillion (Greg Foss talks about this). I see no reason not to raise this up to $1 quadrillion (around 2,000x today's bitcoin market cap) just to make the number a bit easier to work with, and it is not unrealistic to either presume that by the time (maybe 50 years or more into the future) that bitcoin starts grow towards its maximum potential in terms of having various values gravitate into it that the value is likely going to increase (by value creation like you are suggesting).
So, maybe 50 to 100 years down the road the total addressable market might end up being somewhere in the realm of $1 Quadrillion to $10 Quadrillion (or maybe even more) in today's dollars. Some people argue that value creation potential in the future is infinite, but surely I prefer to attempt to stay somewhat grounded, and surely if the number ends up much higher than those projected, then there is nothing wrong with that.. just adapt as you go in terms of accounting for knew situations and systems as they are created and possibly create value too.
There are also theories that we cannot necessarily presume that human civilization is always going to advance, and they are not even bad theories .. and things like the dark ages and even the fact that we cannot figure out how certain things had been built in the past (such as the pyramids) provides evidence that maybe sometimes we suffer from set backs and lose our collective memories in regards to how to do certain things that had been possible in previous times.
As you mention, there may well be limits in bitcoin's current upside, and maybe 10x to 100x from here are somewhat achievable in the next 10-20 years, and maybe the 100x to 2,000x might be more difficult to achieve.. and it may well not be practical to consider that bitcoin would end up being able to absorb all of the addressable market on value storage.. and various derivatives of that - including payments.