Miles, a 37-year-old NHS doctor from London, has been trying to persuade friends to buy cryptocurrencies for years. In recent weeks, the “Trump pump” to crypto prices has left them envious. “They have watched in frustration as my gamble paid off,” he says.
Miles’s crypto portfolio is now worth £2.3m, despite having cashed out about £600,000 earlier this year to buy a house. “It’s set me up for life,” says Miles, who invested £4,000 in bitcoin in 2012. “My pot fluctuates by hundreds of thousands each day, but I’ve been through years of volatile periods.”
Miles was one of dozens of people who shared with the Guardian why they had become crypto retail investors – ordinary people buying digital blockchain currencies – and how their investment had fared over time.
The price of bitcoin has topped $97,000 (£76,500), a new record high, as investors view Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a harbinger of crypto-friendly conditions that will legitimise them as mainstream assets. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has found 12% of UK adults own crypto.
Many respondents said they had entered the crypto market within the past four years, with some using extra funds they had accumulated during Covid lockdowns to buy coins via apps and platforms that were more user friendly than the process of acquiring blockchain currencies had previously been.
The responses also reflected a growing trend for professionals in jobs such as teaching, banking, nursing or IT investing, rather than the “tech bros” historically associated with the crypto sphere, claiming that such investments had been their best, or only, option to build up any meaningful personal wealth.
Scores of middle-class respondents said they had lost trust in existing systems and had turned to crypto in the hope that it would help them reach life goals such as affording to have a child, buy a house or travel.
Julian, 57, a draughtsman, homeowner and father of four from Nottingham, was one of several respondents who said they had bought into bitcoin to insure themselves against rocketing inflation.
“I was getting more and more alarmed that not only was there virtually zero interest paid on my savings, the value of every pound I owned was also reducing due to quantitative easing, as the government happily printed money to bail out the banks,” he says.
Julian decided to invest most of his savings. “Very soon after, the price tanked and I was down 50% for over a year, but never once considered selling because I’d done my homework and knew this was how it performed,” he says.
After four years of consistently “buying the dips”, his stack of bitcoin has performed very well.
“I have no plans to sell, and view it as inheritance for the kids, I’m pretty sure it’ll keep on growing in value. How much bitcoin have I got? Not enough.”
Many armchair investors expressed hopes that bitcoin could reach record heights of $120,000 or more by the first quarter of 2025.
“If the US adopts bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, the sky is the limit,” says one solicitor from Dublin, whose €40,000 bitcoin investment reached a value of €62,000 last week.
Silas Gunn, 18, from North Yorkshire, shared this confidence. Gunn made his first bitcoin purchase about three years ago, after he learned about it through YouTube.
“I’ve put about £5,000 into crypto, and I’m currently sitting on a portfolio of about £95,000,” he says. Gunn hopes this will rise to £500,000 by the end of bitcoin’s current four-year halving cycle, a phenomenon influencing price predictions and trading behaviour enormously.
Many in the crypto community hope that Trump’s incoming administration will end the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s “regulation by enforcement” approach to crypto industries over the past four years – the use of case-by-case legal actions against stakeholders in lieu of rule-making.
Claire, 50, a nurse from New Zealand who started investing in crypto about 10 years ago, was among many respondents who felt uneasy about benefiting from Trump’s election victory.
“Trump’s re-election has led to quite a significant increase in my wealth. I feel a bit guilty, like it’s almost dirty money,” she says.
Although Claire believes in crypto as a philosophical project of decentralised reorganisation and has always been confident about its success, she plans on cashing out soon.
“I’ve had my fun with it. I really need to be a bit more sensible now, and might buy real estate instead,” she says.
The average crypto investor, Claire believes, has changed over time. “It’s surprising how many doctors and nurses are investing in crypto. It’s because it would be hard to make this kind of money in any other way today.”
While thousands of amateur investors such as Claire have reaped sizeable rewards in the crypto sphere, others have only lost money.
Mark, a cycling instructor for children from the north of England, started buying crypto in 2013. “The gradual acceptance of bitcoin by the legacy financial world boosted my confidence in it,” he says.
“But I’ve made endless stupid mistakes, had crypto stolen, lost my faith in bitcoin and sold it, then bought in again at a higher price. I’ve tried to trade and failed miserably. Since 2017, I’ve just left it alone and it’s the best financial decision I’ve ever made.”
Many respondents felt that a thorough understanding of blockchain technology and the crypto market are essential for successful investing. Others assigned their crypto riches to “nothing but dumb luck”.
Mitchell, from Minnesota, in his 30s and earning $100,000 annually in the tech industry, acquired 16,000 Dogecoin – touted by Elon Musk as the “people’s crypto” – for $1,300 between 2021 and 2022. It is currently worth about $6,000.
“I figured if it ever reached $100 a coin, it was an easy million,” he says. “Understanding crypto better now, I know that Dogecoin will almost certainly never reach those heights.”
In December 2023, having watched house prices rise faster than he could save, Mitchell took “a desperate gamble”, he says, and bought a single bitcoin for $42,000. In just under a year that investment has more than doubled to $90,000.
Mitchell now fears a “massive” crypto crash in the near future, but has decided not to sell for now.
“I guess I’m staying on this ride in the hope that analysts forecasting mid-$100,000s for bitcoin by the end of 2025 are right, though the biggest thing I’ve learned in the last four years is that no one making those guesses has any idea what they’re talking about,” he says.
“If they’re right, though, maybe I can finally afford that house.”
