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Very well said! I understand the technology, of course, and I am confident that my savings (which quadrupled thanks to Bitcoin) can go over $1mil one day. For now they are enough only for a small house or a nice new car.
Actually, if you have been dollar cost averaging into bitcoin since some time before you registered your BTC talk account, you have had a relatively "modest amount" that you could use to buy into bitcoin without gambling too much, you did not accumulate BTC or largely establish your BTC stake yet or even in the sub $1k territory, and you made various mistakes along the way, which is merely human, I can understand how it is possible that you have established a decent stake in bitcoin relative to the vast majority of folks who have not established any kind of bitcoin position, but you still feel that you are far from any kind of point that you could rely on BTC to maintain a passive income (based on your lifestyle expectations).
Any investment can take a long fucking time to establish, and if you have a possible cushion of 15 years (even though perhaps you prefer a shorter amount of time, such as 5 years) you are likely still going to be much better off than any kind of average or traditional investment(s), given the likely places where bitcoin is going to go.
Many traditional investment will allow you to earn a decent return, between 4% and 12% per year, with a large number of folks returning on the low end of that range. Bitcoin is likely to perform much better. I had accumulated a decent amount of wealth before bitcoin from my investments; however, I believe that my average annual return was still only about 5.5%, even though I felt that I did pretty well, overall.
I have an appartment and a VW CC, so for now I don't need cash.
Well having a cashflow that covers all of your expenses for the next few years remains important in deciding how much you can afford to invest (assuming that you might be inclined to max out some of the bitcoin on the front end based on your optimism of it while continuing to have your living expenses covered for decent periods of time out into the future with an income stream that is quasi-reliable). We already should realize that living within your means remains important and such practices seem prudent in bitcoin too, even though it is also possible to leverage (but to me, leveraging – such as getting loans to invest in bitcoin, seems too greedy and unnecessary with the likely level of BTC returns)
The last year for me was more nervous because of the uncertainty of the forks. But now I am absolutely confident that Bitcoin is here to stay (even if traitors like Ver and Wu tried to steal the project one way or another, Bitcoin ramained what it is meant to be).
Actually, several of us seem to recognize a certain level of profundity in the bitcoin world in terms of the resolutions that were shown both in early 2017 with the beginning of the breaking past the previous ATH, and then in mid-to-late 2017 when the hardfork attacks (and other governance attacks) seemed to had fallen on their face - with even worse attempts at trying to hold the forks and attacks together with various failed spam and FUD spreading attacks that did not even stop segwit from going into place and lightning network going into a live testing mode (rather than staying on testnet for a longer period of time).
With the coming bakkt and ETF in 1-2 years tops, Bitcoin will remain the first blockchain currency (and Wall Street exchange asset), so its value will never stop rising.
The financialization of bitcoin has been increasing and increasing and increasing and sometimes even on the lowdown with some institutions likely attempting to acquire bitcoin because of fundamental aspects of bitcoin – and such behind the scenes accumulation seem to be very much in the background and seem to be building in bitcoin's favor, even if there remain attempts to spread FUD or even the froth in the alt coin space having some negative dragging affect on bitcoin’s price and confusion about which crypto is the place in which money is flowing - while many of us who understand bitcoin can see past some of the snake oilsmanship that is taking place and the flaws of some of these diversion projects - icos built on ethereum, and even diversions of stable coins that are ultimately flow into bitcoin, since bitcoin is the only crypto that is really sound money in terms of not printing money out of the air, like almost every other project with its own coin devolves into.
Of course, I am not delusional. There will be dips and sideways and it will be tough to hold at those moments.
Exactly correct to prepare for the dips and sideways and even prepare for long periods with possible extreme movements that seem to be keeping BTC price below fundamentals... which is not wanted but within the realm of possibilities that BTC price manipulators are going to manipulate the price and sentiments downwards as low and as long as they are capable of doing.
Speaking of predictions, I have 3 variants for the next 7 years (after 2 halvings).
1. The bearish one: In 2-3 years the price will revisit the 20K range. In 6-7 years it will reach $40-50K.
2. The mild bullish: In 2-3 years: 40K. In 6-7 years it will reach $100K.
3. The most bullish: In 2-3: 100K. In 6-7 years it will reach $500K.
I hope for the best but I can live with scenario 1. In 6 years I will still have 15 years to retirement, so I need only to buy moar and hold.
I appreciate your outlining of scenarios that you believe to be probable and most probable, but really it seems to me that you are not really accounting for the vast array of BTC price scenarios – even if you are attempting to stay in the middle of the road – and you are not putting your scenarios into a kind of probability range – which certainly each of us are going to frame these probabilities a bit differently. Furthermore, it seems that even your optimistic scenario ends up with John McAfee eating his dick on TV.
I am going to attempt to elaborate on your scenarios by adding more scenarios and assigning probabilities to them. By the way, I do agree with any premise that BTC’s performance in 6-7 years will partly depend upon how it performs in the next 2-3 years.
BTC’s price will be: First column in 2-3 years Second column in 6-7 years
Below $1k = Less than 3% Less than 1.5%
$1k to $3k = 8% to 12% 7% to 9%
$3k to $5k = 10% to 15% 8% to 12%
$5k to $10k = 10% to 15% 8% to 12%
$10k to $19k = 15% to 18% 12% to 15%
$19k to $30k = 15% to 18% 15% to 18%
$30k to $50k = 15% to 18% 15% to 18%
$50k to $100k = 12% to 15% 15% to 18%
$100k to $500k = 5% to 10% 10% to 15%
$500k to $1mill = 2% to 4% 10% to 15%
More than $1mill = Less than 1% Less than 5%
I’m kind of pulling the above estimates out of my ass (straight); however, my point still remains that each set of circumstances has probabilities, even though in the end, we are going to arrive at ONLY one spot once we get there. Nonetheless, from our current perspective, we cannot rule out extremely bearish or extremely bullish scenarios, even though the probabilities seem to be on a kind of upwardly skewed bell curve.
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