I'd definitely concur that your first paragraph holds. Having a flutter is one thing. Buy £5 of ether on Coinbase, see what happens! Investing seriously, OH DEAR GOD NO.

The motivation for this is that I keep hearing from friends asking "help, [relative] thinks bitcoins are a good idea! what do I do?" So instead of abstruse jargon-laden blockchain inside baseball posts, I tried to write something more accessible about the problems.