While it is true that we (techies, rationalists, etc.) have the opportunity to catch a gold rush by becoming early adopterst, I suspect survivorship bias is at play. There are plenty of people who try to systematically 'grind' on such opportunitities but it doesn't pan out for many of them - I know some people who used to mass-register domains, and made a neglible profit in the end, people who jump on all sorts of altcoins, programmers who join a promising startup, where they sacrifice salary for equity, etc. Additionally, I also started messing with bitcoins in 2011, and while it has been quite profitable, I have made less than six figures, since I wasn't very serious about it at the time. And yes, in retrospect I can say that I should've put more money in (and kept them in bitcoin), but if I follow the same line of reasoning with all the seemingly-promising things I see, I might very well go broke.

I wish I was already an experienced gold rush spotter, so I could explain how best to do it, but as indicated above, I participated in the ones that I did more or less by luck.

Indeed, luck seems to be a big part of it, and the main action that you can take to facilitate the process is probably to put yourself in the right circles, so you can hear and look into innovations early on. This, however, is something that you and many people on here already do, and I doubt that you can easily find another intervention that will have as big of an impact on your chances to participate in a gold rush.