I don’t understand how anyone makes money in Bitcoin. Is anyone still mining it?

Not politically right answer... But what I read, learnt and believe the demand for crypto currency

1) people living in countries with hyper inflation and believing that bitcoin and friends are actually more stable currencies than their own local currency (read South America, Africa and countries that are essentially broke). For them, bitcoin is a wealth preservation tool to use like gold.

2) a lot of news articles and documentaries / news seem to suggest the black market and people with unknown sources of wealth would like to wash the "dirty laundry" and convert into bitcoin which might be a cheaper way to clean and send money back. hypothetical example - B makes cocaine in a South American country and exports / smuggled it to North America for sale. Once sold in US, the drug dealer needs to send the collected drug sales proceeds and send back home to fund more drugs. Instead of going to bank and do tt or wire transfer (and risk getting attention from authorities), maybe they can consider buying bitcoin with USD and give the bitcoin to someone in B's home country

Ultimately, its two points - virtual currency, and potential money supply.

Food for thought

• so if we say 50 of currency A can buy bitcoin, but you need 100 of currency B to also buy bitcoin. So virtual bitcoin exchange rate says 1 dollar of currency A = 2 dollar of currency B? Is this following actual real exchange rates? Who regulates and say if the conversion for bitcoin follows real rates?

• is bitcoin valid money supply? So who controls the growth? If many people mine, there is many mined bitcoin... So if fed wants to increases interest rates / reduce currency via monetary policy, but can it affect bitcoin population? Mining means the bitcoin quantity will always go up, so how this work in real life? If we want to reduce money supply through central bank, then who ensures bitcoin trends are similar, and don't need to check for weird arbitrage - eg converting cash to bitcoin and then send payment across via virtual?

Bitcoin is a tricky investment first of all. It’s all about market sentiments of demand and supply. There’s only 21 million units of it and around 18.5 million of them in circulation excluding derivates of other Bitcoin. Do not step into it if you’re not an investor with a high risk appetite. It’s highly volatile. It will be long until Bitcoin can be considered another safe haven like Gold but due to tech advancements over the years and younger investors turning to crypto as an additional input in their portfolio, Bitcoin will reach higher highs but will also reach lower lows. And that’s the risk you have to decide if you wanna take.