Bitcoin Hit $120k. Is It Too Late to Care About Crypto?

A friend asked me this the other day. Let’s break it down, without the hype.

So, it happened. Bitcoin smashed through $120,000. Your group chat is probably going nuts, and that one cousin who bought some back in 2018 is suddenly a financial genius.

It’s easy to look at that number and feel one of two things:

1. A massive wave of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
2. A deep sense of skepticism, like you’ve just walked in at the end of a very weird party.

I get it. A friend messaged me the other day with a screenshot of a Reddit post, basically asking, “What even is this stuff, and did I miss the boat?”

Let’s talk about it. No jargon, no promises of getting rich. Just a simple, honest look at what’s going on.

First, What Even Is Cryptocurrency?

Let’s zoom out. Forget the crazy prices for a second.

At its heart, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is just digital money. It lets you send value from one person to another over the internet without a bank or a company like PayPal in the middle.

Think about it like this: When you send a Venmo payment, Venmo’s private records are updated. You trust Venmo to keep track of it all.

With crypto, there’s no single company in charge. Instead, the record of all transactions is stored on a massive public ledger called a blockchain. Thousands of computers around the world have a copy of this ledger, and they all work together to verify that the transactions are legitimate.

It’s a bit like a shared public notebook that anyone can see but no single person can change on their own. That’s the core idea. It’s an open financial network.

So, How Can You Invest Reliably?

This is the tricky part. Honestly, “reliable” and “crypto” don’t always hang out together. The prices are famously volatile. They can swing wildly based on news, hype, or seemingly nothing at all.

So if you’re looking for a safe, predictable return like a government bond, this isn’t it.

But if you’re curious and want to dip a toe in, people who’ve been around for a while tend to think about it differently. It’s less about “trading” and more about “investing” in the technology you believe in.

Here’s a more grounded approach:

• Do your homework. Don’t just buy a coin because its logo is cute or someone on TikTok mentioned it. Spend an hour reading about what it actually does. Is it trying to be a faster payment system? A platform for apps? A joke?
• Don’t invest your rent money. This is crucial. Only put in an amount you would be genuinely okay with losing. Seriously. It takes the emotion out of it.
• Think in years, not days. The people who do well are often the ones who buy a little bit of a solid project and then forget about it for a few years. Trying to time the daily swings is a recipe for anxiety.

Okay, What’s This “DeFi” Thing?

You might hear this term thrown around. DeFi stands for “Decentralized Finance.”

If crypto is the money, DeFi is what you can do with the money.

Imagine a big box of financial LEGO blocks. You can use these blocks to build things you’d normally do at a bank, but without the bank itself.

• Lending & Borrowing: You can lend out your crypto to earn interest, or you can use your crypto as collateral to borrow more. It all happens through code—no forms, no credit checks, no bank manager.
• Exchanging: You can swap one type of crypto for another instantly on decentralized exchanges.
• Earning Yield: Some people put their crypto into these DeFi systems to provide liquidity and earn rewards. It’s more complex and has its own risks, but it’s a huge part of the ecosystem.

DeFi is basically an attempt to build an open, transparent, and automated financial system on top of the blockchain. It’s fascinating, experimental, and still very new.

The $120,000 Question: Is It Too Late?

Now we get to the big one. After a massive price jump, is there still a point?

It’s easy to look at a price like $120k and think the ship has sailed. And if your only goal was to buy Bitcoin at $1 and sell at $120k, then yes, you missed that specific rocket.

But that’s like looking at the price of Amazon stock today and only thinking about its past as an online bookstore. You’d be missing the cloud computing (AWS), streaming, and logistics empire it became.

The story isn’t just about Bitcoin’s price anymore.

It’s about whether you think DeFi will continue to grow. It’s about whether other blockchains like Ethereum will become the foundation for a new version of the web. It’s about digital art, gaming economies, and a dozen other experiments being built on this tech.

So, no, I don’t think it’s “too late” to be curious. It’s probably too late to get 1000x returns overnight on an obvious bet. But it might be the perfect time to start learning about what’s being built beyond the price tickers.

The real opportunity isn’t just buying a coin and hoping it goes up. It’s understanding a new, weird, and interesting corner of the internet that’s just getting started.

Stay curious.