Now or wait?

[Lucius]

Thanks Lucius. Wise words. For everyone who's already an investor in BTC I hope there is no correction and it keeps rising. For me, I hope it plummets momentarily to enable me to climb aboard the BTC train at a low(er) level. 

There will always be a correction, the market cannot function in such a way that the price of something only goes up. It is difficult to predict what will happen by the end of the year with BTC, but it all really depends on how hard the pandemic will hit the world in the next 4-5 months. If stocks and oil experience such a dramatic decline again (as in March 2020), it is almost certain that BTC will lose at least 50% of its value.

What can currently bring down the price of BTC is some very negative news like hacking some of the top 5 crypto exchanges or that someone decides to sell a really large quantity on the open market. So if it's a smaller investment I don't see much point in whether your entry point is at $15000 or $17000 - but if you're buying one whole BTC then the difference is as much as $2000.

[clifjw]

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If you’re interested in playing around with DCA scenarios, there are some calculators around that let you perform simulations, such as https://dcabtc.com/. This one has the advantage that you can do retrospective analysis over past timeframes (unlike others that bring the deadline until the current date), although the "accumulate for" is limited to 6 months or multiples of a whole year from the "starting" point.

Not all scenarios are necessarily favourable: going over the historical BTC price, (see the chart at https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/), I parametrized the page for a weekly purchase of 100$, accumulation for a year (only) since 19/11/2017.

The result would be:

"Wow! Buying $100 of Bitcoin every week for 1 year starting on 2017-11-19 would have turned $5,300 into $3,666 (-30%)". Not good at all.

But … If I’d held on for another year, the results would be:
"Wow! Buying $100 of Bitcoin every week for 2 years starting on 2017-11-19 would have turned $10,500 into $13,392 (+27%)". A fair share better.

Thank you very much for that DdmrDdmr. That's great, I'll look at that. Be good to get some ideas using historical data. I like the two examples you gave, and just goes to show how you need to be careful and truly understand what you're doing rather than just investing because it sounds cool.

First of all, congrats for being so interested and preferring to rather invest your time to study Bitcoin than quickly rush the investments and have them easily go wrong. I like how you think and the "invest only what you can afford to lose" idea is as true as it can get. Keep on reading - it's something you should never stop doing, but also something a lot of people really don't do (unfortunately).

If I was to start again from zero, I'd honestly just keep purchasing whenever I have money to allocate for crypto investments. Besides the very beginning when I didn't know much about Bitcoin or other kind of investments at all, I've never had even a single Bitcoin investment go wrong as I've always had patience with it. Long term has always paid Bitcoin hodlers well, and I personally have high hopes for the future.

Purchasing a HW is a great idea. Another thing you could consider is purchasing a (or making your own) steel seed backup tablet/capsule for protection against really bad events such as strong house fires.

Altcoins are a very volatile and risky area. If Bitcoin is risky itself as an investment, altcoins are worse. Most of the time, it's only an illusion that you earn more money in the end - I mean, you do earn a profit with some of them.. but in the end, while an alt goes up twice (in USD) while other alts go down, Bitcoin usually increases way more than that in price and if you do a little calculus in the end, you'd find out that having invested everything in BTC from the start would've been way more profitable than investing in multiple coins.

As you said, everything is speculative about the price. If I was to tell you my own opinion, it'd be that even at $50k Bitcoin would still be very cheap for me on the longer term - and I'd still invest my time and money in it even if it ever gets up there. But that's a risk I take and assume - as you say, it could very well just drop at any given time (and there are quite a lot of historical drops I've been through myself). Emotionally, it makes you want to get out of the market.

Besides the first years of my crypto adventure, I've never let myself be emotionally driven again because I noticed that's the specific reason I kept messing up. Now for the investment strategy, I'll support the DCA as well. As long as you don't want to make quick wins, I think you'd be fine going for it. But again, I'm not a crystal ball and I really hope I am not wrong. However, investment equals risk and if you get to accept this idea, you should be fine.

Thanks 20kevin20.   Rushing into things isn't really my style. As suggested earlier, that's probably why I'm not one of those already doing well from BTC and other investments.
The steel seed backup sounds interesting. I'd heard of paper wallets as being good cold storage, but not that so I'll look into that.
Thanks for the advice on alt coins, I'm definitely predominately interested in BTC at this point, but I see no harm in dabbling in the alt coin market (albeit with low expectations and certainly not big numbers), but when I do I'll be doing so based on the underlying technology not the coin itself. If I can see a good use case for the tech and the coin then I'll happily invest in a little. But I want to avoid pump and dumps or anything that looks like it doesn't particularly have a good use purpose. I'd rather put more into BTC in that case.
I'd love a quick win, as most would, but I think I'd only be looking at a larger investment if and when BTC corrects itself. Given the state of the tech and the amount of time to go to reach the cap I believe there's a lot more ups and downs on the way. I don't believe it will be a straight jump to astronomical levels unless there's some unplanned, unexpected event that triggers it. I'd love to see the bump it gets in the event of BTC becoming more user friendly to non-techies.  
Thanks again for providing your input.

[clifjw]

Regarding Merit. I'll be honest, I have seen a post or two about it but I don't understand it. Bitcoin underlying technology makes more sense to me than that lol. I understand its a way of paying respect for quality posts on this board. I just don't understand why people are chasing it so badly. Maybe you can enlighten me?  

Yes it is very simple. People want merits, because without them you can't rank up. For example in order to become Sr. Member, it is required to have received at least 250 merits. So far so good, by being active on this forum it means that you'll get higher ranks in the future. Now here's the nice part. Signature campaigns. I hope you understand that this place is surrounded by geniuses, either on the technical background of bitcoin or on the marketing of it. Since everyone here talks about bitcoin, it would be the greatest place to advertise your products, for example a casino or an exchange site. You can do that by well paying the forum's admin (@theymos).

Then someone thought of a better way. Advertising on members' signature. Right now I'm advertising a product (from both signature and avatar). Signature campaign managers want members that make quality posts. The more merits, the better proof that you make quality posts. Take a look on this thread: Overview of Bitcointalk Signature-Ad Campaigns.

I observe that you'll have a future on bitcoin and I would suggest you to be active on this forum. You'll learn so many things here.

Ahhhh. Thank you BlackHatCoiner. Yes that makes sense now. Still I'm not sure it's something I'd actively chase. I do like the idea that those posting quality content have the potential to earn back though. Personally I don't feel like I have much to offer (or could ever in comparison to you guys that have been at it for years), but maybe as I learn more one day I'll say something that someone in my position now finds helpful. Right now my focus is only on filling my own knowledge gaps between the stuff I've read and seen on Andreas Antonopoulos's talks. I think what I'm lacking at the moment is a working knowledge of buying/selling/wallets etc. I know the technical, and the functionality of them, how it works and the terminology, I just don't have the latest information on which are the best wallets/exchanges for me which is what I'm currently researching.

Thanks Lucius. Wise words. For everyone who's already an investor in BTC I hope there is no correction and it keeps rising. For me, I hope it plummets momentarily to enable me to climb aboard the BTC train at a low(er) level.  

There will always be a correction, the market cannot function in such a way that the price of something only goes up. It is difficult to predict what will happen by the end of the year with BTC, but it all really depends on how hard the pandemic will hit the world in the next 4-5 months. If stocks and oil experience such a dramatic decline again (as in March 2020), it is almost certain that BTC will lose at least 50% of its value.

What can currently bring down the price of BTC is some very negative news like hacking some of the top 5 crypto exchanges or that someone decides to sell a really large quantity on the open market. So if it's a smaller investment I don't see much point in whether your entry point is at $15000 or $17000 - but if you're buying one whole BTC then the difference is as much as $2000.

Right I see Lucius. Thank you. I guess since no one knows whats next, the current level could be a perfectly good time to join the party. In 4-5 months I might be sitting here saying damn I wish I'd bought at least a little when it was $15k-$17k.    BTC, much like any other investment, is volatile in nature and I understand and respect that, but for some reason my gut feel is to expect another drop. Where I am knowledge wise right now, I'm happy to buy in with some very small amounts while I wait to see what happens over the next month or so. I'd be more than happy by that time to invest some larger amounts (still within my acceptable loss range) if I saw the price drop back to the $7k/$8k mark.

[akirasendo17]

Price now is at the peak it will surely go down to half of the price, that's how the volatile crypto is, but if you are just going to use bitcoin to purchase another coin to invest its okay, it's just that holding bitcoin at this point is not advisable, if you are going to hold it, wait for the price to go down, you have to learn that feeling to be left behind in crypto should not be in your vocabulary.

[Lucius]

Price now is at the peak it will surely go down to half of the price, that's how the volatile crypto is...

BTC is volatile, no one will dispute that - but don't be so sure that the price is at its peak now, because we are in a situation that has not been seen before. Governments around the world are trying to save their economies by various measures, and so-called helicopter money policy which is particularly pronounced in the US makes fiat less and less valuable. As a result, more and more companies and individuals are transferring part of their fiat funds to BTC, and for the result we have the current price.

Of course, it is possible that the price will halve - but in my opinion, the upward trend is very strong and there is no indication of any weakening. Yet I don’t want anyone to take this as financial advice, it’s just my personal opinion that is the result of daily observation of what’s going on in the world.