In terms of getting rich, that was luck. Some people with perhaps more money than sense played the lottery and won. Bitcoin could have, and might still fail with governments giving it more scrutiny as it grows, or this may be its peak, so anyone buying now is screwed. No way to know.
It's also easy to look back at Amazon and say you should have invested back when they were an online bookstore that talked a big game. With the information available at the time it arguably would have been a stupid decision.
For everyone who won big on Amazon and everyone who's winning big on Bitcoin, there are thousands if not millions of investors who bet on something with legitimate confidence and lost it all or under-performed.
As for what it is, as far as I'm concerned it's just another commodity. The value of said commodity can be debated, the same way people can talk about how silver is not only a precious metal but has substantial industrial demand driving it, unlike gold. They're still all commodities.
Now plenty of people have played the commodity lottery and gotten crazy rich in crazy circumstances that are hard if not impossible to repeat. If you want to try and be one of them by speculating on bitcoin, don't use any money you can't lose.
For my perspective, my financial goals for my family haven't been met yet and probably won't be for a couple of decades given that we've yet to buy a house and the wife and I are hoping to give our future kids a full ride through college. I can invest the money I make in cheap, diversified funds based on Fama/French factors and have nobel-winning math and statistics saying I have a positive expected return over time given 100 years of stock market history, or I can gamble it in the various single-stock/commodity/sector lotteries with large amounts of uncompensated risk and hope I win big, but more likely lose and never meet my goals.
My current solution to "more money" is I'm seriously looking into trying to get some sort of lifestyle business going on top of my day job. Worst case scenario it sharpens my technical skills and makes me even more employable. I like sets of outcomes that don't include (or at least minimize the likelihood of) "zero".