Well, Cex.io used to pay me in Bitcoin, typically .10 cents per word, so back then I was easily making $80 or 0.2 BTC per article, and writing 3-5 articles a week. That was around the bear whale trend in which we hovered around $150-250 for a few weeks.

I've made money, I've lost money, both from exchange hacks (Finex, Mintpal, Cryptsy, and Gox) and newbie errors, but I love this stuff too much to ever be discouraged. Luckily, my last two years trading and mining have been very successful as I've learned more about markets and such. I don't really lose any money these days as I look more towards long-term investments rather than margin gambling on OKCoin and the rest.