you can always just buy bitcoin and litecoin at whatever they are right now with your 500 and hope they keep going up. I did this about 10 days ago and made 400 bucks, mostly on the litecoin. There's a bit of risk, sure, but there are fewer gate keepers than the stockmarket, and the fairly low. It's not hard to withdraw cash. At this point, I've removed my initial investment, so I've only got the profit I turned still in coinbase, which i've moved around a little to try and make more.