I have been following Bitcoin over the past two years. This spring, the trend that I was waiting for started to happen: Many companies that sell services and products started accepting Bitcoin as a direct payment method.
As I expected, once this started to happen, the Bitcoin (BTC) value (in USD) started to climb...and has pretty much continued unabated (with an expected price point of $5,000 USD per 1 BTC by the end of the year.
Of course, I was not interested in 'trading' Bitcoin nor buying it at that elevated price (or the Risk of ICO's). What I wanted to do was figure out a way to invest some dollars to CREATE Bitcoin - and then hold on to it to allow the appreciation to grow and/or cash it out to take the money and reinvest in other assests.
Without ging into all the details at this point, BTC is created through a process of 'mining'. Mining uses specialized and powerful computing power (caled Hash Power) to do the complex calculations to verify BTC transactions and get a 'reward' as a result of finding/verifying new BTC.
Now I could (just as you could) invest in the actual equipment but nowadays, the amount you need to initially invest and the time it takes to get this running profitably is beyond the reach of most people.
So, I started investigating 'cloud mining' companies.
Basically, you purchase mining contracts, pay a reasonable service fee and generate BTC that you own and can keep.
Main providers for cloud mining contracts are HashFlare and Genesis Mining
After looking at the mining plans, I picked HashFlare as it seemed the easiest way to buy-in for a reasonably low amount and gradually compound as you can buy Hash Rates (computing power) at fractional rates.