SEOUL, South Korea — Choi Whal-soo has been through the wringer of speculative bubbles.

After selling his real estate agency near Seoul, he invested in South Korean stocks and then watched them plummet in value after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. He tried to recover, continuing to play the stock market and lotteries, but lost yet more money.

Now, at 77 years old, he is hoping he can make it all back in the booming virtual currency markets, which have pushed the price of Bitcoin to new highs above $10,000 and pulled up the price of many alternative digital tokens.

Last week, Mr. Choi visited the physical location of one of South Korea’s many new virtual currency exchanges, with a plan to put about a quarter of his remaining $18,000 in savings into virtual currencies.

“I may have missed the Bitcoin boat but new boats are coming and I want to hop on those,” he said. “It is possible that some might be scams but even with those, the prices will rise at least in the middle of their life cycles so that there will be a chance to make money from trading them.”