And that's of course a speculation. It might look that way now, but as with any kind of investment, there is no way to tell what happens tomorrow, much less what happens in five years. Big finance might have swiped out bitcoin and replaced it with their own standard blockchain at that time. Always be sure to only invest the amount you are prepared to lose!

If you are in Switzerland, you can buy Bitcoins from the railway ticket machines. ;-)
They activated the service today I think. It's a bit pricey, there is a 6% fee, but at least it's relatively safe.
If you can not trust the swiss railways, what else can you trust? lol

good luck!

Buying a large amount of BTC is not an issue nowadays, but you better watch where you do it.

Localbitcoins will be one option if you do not want to go through the hassle of creating an account with an exchange site,
but it will take some time to find the number of people who are trusted, can offer you bigger amounts and are willing to trade with you
as a newbie.

Another option is to open an exchange account with a trusted exchange, like coinbase or bitstamp, but it will take some time
to go through their verification processes, like ID verification, etc. The advantage is that once you have this, you are basically set, and
the fees to buy/sell are much lower than anywhere else.

good luck

I am using bitstamp.net, but only trade BTC.
Nice feature is that you can now exchange BTC/USD, BTC/EUR and USD/EUR as well.
Not the bigest exchange, but IMO very professional.
You can also lower your fee per trade if you do a lot of trades, but I guess that is present in some form everywhere.

Hope this helps

Yes, me too. 
I was too late to read this thread, but at least I learned a lesson.
I am not invested with too much anyway.

For me the excuse was that since I paid with CC, they have to 'hold back' my BTC payments for a month, since they want to be 'safe' to receive the payment first.
This BTW reminds me that I have the option to ask my bank to cancel the transfer, since it's been only like a week since I signed up.   
I guess I have to thank them that they went out so quickly before my actual month passed, at which point my bank would not be able to cancel the sum.

Anyway, I do not really understand why they decided to shut down right now.
Zcash is just getting mainstream and they were offering 'pre bought' contracts to start to mine in December ...