Only buy Bitcoin if you're OK with losing money

MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles faces charges of embezzlement 

Like many people, I've been tempted to look at Bitcoin. Look at those prices! $7000, $8000, $9000, every day is a new peak! But seriously, is it a good idea to put your money in Bitcoin? You can lose money just through the daily price seesaw. Some even say the only winners are the early adopters that came in (either by buying or mining) around 2010-11?

Bitcoin is not supported by a government/central authority, but the fact that there's no federal/insurance backing is considered a positive to some eco-anarchists. If that even makes sense at all? So the chances of losing most/all of your money are very real.

Recent news reports shed light to how this works in the real world. There's no widely-accepted way to maintain Bitcoins, much less purchasing them, that nicely balances convenience with safety/security.  Wired's Mark Frauenfelder is a security-freak, so he put his $30,000 Bitcoin wallet offline in an super-secure USB disk -- which he promptly lost the passcodes to. He had to jump through so many hoops: he basically hired someone to hack into his own encrypted drive.

Consider the previous guy lucky: at least he eventually got his Bitcoins back. Gizmodo's Nick Douglas just wanted simplicity, so he invested with the largest global Bitcoin exchange at the time… which was OK until MtGox collapsed amid millions of dollars of Bitcoin theft (theft or criminal misconduct? yes please!).

So yeah, you shouldn't invest in Bitcoin -- it's just not investment-grade yet.  You may consider buying Bitcoin, but only if you know and are mentally prepared if you lose all of it.  Some even say, Bitcoin is just like the dotcom bubble, if people in 2000 didn't know what the internet was for.