How do you know what not to invest in then? Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency fifteen years ago. It wasn't even the first digital currency. If you hop on every bandwagon, you'll go broke far more then you become wealthy. Just look at all the people who poured money into NFTs or digital real estate in the metaverse or Dogecoin or whatever.

It's easy to say "well of course I would have invested in Google in 1999" but there was nothing in 1999 to say that Google was going to be as big as it was. Why not Lycos or Dogpile or AskJeeves?

How many people dedicated their careers to Flash, only to have it die at the hands of Steve Jobs and HTML5? It's not just about bailing out: lots of folks had to start over because taking advantage of the opportunity means actually investing real time and money. "As a tulip bulb producer, I would have simply stopped producing tulip bulbs when it started to seem questionable." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

I don't think you're understanding my point. Hopping on the bandwagon is explicitly not "maximizing your foothold while minimizing your downside," nor is it early-stage almost by definition. An early stage technology with an uncertain future cannot have a bandwagon.

I think the logical thing to do is to invest a minor amount of time/money across a broad spectrum of new promising tech. If you had been aware of and bought $500 of Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be a billionaire today. The early people involved with NFTs also did very well.

The Flash example is specifically the opposite of my point. Flash was a lucrative skill for a period of time, but at a certain point it became very clear that it didn't have a future.