I'm starting to turn the corner on this; if you can pick it up on one of its lows, which are pretty extreme as far as I know, like 1/4 of peak, and hold without regard for daily movement, you will probably make money.
I think Bitcoin is largely taking value from individuals trying to stash money pilfered from the public in some way (usually through their public offices, but sometimes through embezzlement, theft, or a previous illegal accumulation that has to be moved in the face of imminent arrest), and opportunities for this sort of large-scale theft come rarely. So upward movements are caused by small groups and happen very quickly. After the theft is made, the first priority is to get the money out of the country (or tied for first with getting your children out of the country), then to get one's self out of the country. The tolerance for loss in exfiltrating this cash is virtually unlimited, in exchange for speed.
Small pops and falls caused by individual incidents will sometimes coincide making a larger pop, and periodically some legal loophole (or prosecution pressure) will open up in come country that puts a lot of people in this situation at the same time. This is inevitable. The small pops are muted due to the selling of previous market moving buyers. The big pops are virtuous circles; they exhaust the supply of previous smugglers, who cash out, and the resulting acceleration in the upward price movement filters to the media, where knife-catchers step in. You probably want to time your sales to the knife-catchers, anticipating the first articles reporting on the price rise.
There will always be western countries where you can cash out. There's no way to suppress a currency designed for money laundering in a west that is entirely financial services and intellectual property; there will always be some official that can be bribed, or a country that needs the tax receipts. Bitcoin can do to nations what Uber and AirBnB do to cities.
I'd bet the floor on bitcoin would probably be a good measure to determine growth in the general world corruption rate; the more good pops, the more people feel like they can hold a little bit longer.
Think of cartels burying cash in fields, and how much they'd be willing to pay to make it spendable. The only other option is to burn it. Going into business to help them from the comfort of your living room is not a bad business.
This article is not good, though, just nonsense reassurance mostly (bitcoin is small, but things that become big start small, so bitcoin will be big.) Worse, the more large institutions are holding bitcoin, the less benefit for individual investors, not more, because they'll absorb the big pops, and do it in a way that they end up holding an optimum amount of BTC all the time using their international nature and their ability to shift losses to offset gains for tax purposes (in short, regulatory arbitrage.) Bitcoin could ultimately end up as an exclusive partnership between thieves avoiding capture and banks avoiding taxes. A sort of high-speed virtualized real estate.
/flight of fancy