I'm very sorry to hear that. Fortunes are still being made, though, and baggerlord and Visaria have the right idea to start researching some promising cryptos, who knows? Ethereum, Neo, Ripple and others have 10's of thousands of percent returns. I never invested in those so can't speak for them.
Monero (xmr) is one of my core holdings, the coin mentioned in the imgur link on the OP. I'm fully aware that a huge part of my successes in trading cryptos is because of the adage "bull market makes everyone a genius" and all my holdings can go to zero, but such is life, it's a risk.
Monero is a privacy coin so can't discuss my cost basis

but I can tell you I suck at timing. Monero was trading for months between $0.25 to $0.50 in 2014 (currently priced at near ATH $137'sh) so $500 worth would be worth $137,000 to $274,000 now. I heard of it when it was around $1.50 as I was invested in Darkcoin (now called Dash) and we were getting trolled on the forums by a Monero supporter, but funny thing was when I looked at the arguments, they were all valid so I bought a couple of hundred coins, only to sell within a couple of months as it wasn't doing anything.
I got into Monero when big news about adoption in October and my last batch/buy was ATH at the time. Holding cryptos is easy? Monero was down 60% within 2 months from ATH. I got a windfall from another coin a month ago and put a bunch of the profits to Monero. I suck at trading, so guess what? 30% down from the high price within a couple of weeks and NEO is pumping over 100% on certain days. It was difficult watching your coin down that much and not sell to jump to NEO or some other pump coins. I did hold. Now all good.
Monero at $1.50 was fairly valued. At the current price in this environment, $137 price per Monero is a discount. Can't expand on that without talking my book, so leave it at that.