Early adopters who knows what they are doing will definitely garnish a good result. When it comes to government trying to control Bitcoin system, they will be in a tough fight because Bitcoin is decentralized and has no focal point of operation that the government can go after to stop Bitcoin. Anyone can support the network and keep it running thus the government limited by their jurisdiction cannot do anything about the Bitcoin system. Their law applies only to their country but Bitcoin operation is spread out globally.
Today, latecomers like myself are ruing lost opportunities. This is because we can attest to the economic leverage crytocurrencies especially bitcoin has given to our pairs who saw today, yesterday. We proclaimed it was a scam like MMM and other Ponzi schemes. We waited in vain to see people regret putting their finances into bitcoin, and have now decided to join them since we couldn't "beat" them. There were warnings from various governments about the unpredictable of Cryptos little did we know that these government agencies have persons who were already trading in the "scam".
In a cyclical market, there is no late comers to take advantage of the benefits offered. All we need to do is time the right moment to enter so that we can be able to get profit when the cycle ended and just rinse and repeat. Btw, I never think that Bitcoin is like a ponzi scheme since it was put in an open market where everyone has the freedom to decide. Bitcoin does not promise anything but a goal of p2p electronic transfer that does not need any third party that can challenged fiat currency that uses intermediaries for transaction. It is clear that Bitcoin never promised profit but instead aim to give financial transaction a freedom.