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I think it all depends on what one considers "Bitcoin dust"... For most, this could be < 0.001 BTC. For many it could be < 0.1 BTC, and for some it could be < 1 BTC or even < 10 BTC...
I am having doubts about whether it is worth the suffering to battle around about subjective versus objective evaluations of dust... so I will not challenge your characterization at this time, but I am not going to waive my right to bring it up later, especially if it continues to wear upon my consciousness..
As for the amount invested in Bitcoin over the years, sure, I've made some big mistakes, like only investing around $100 on my first BTC purchase (got around 0.5 BTC for that), when I had $10,000 in cash sitting in my desk drawer. Had I invested that amount straight away, I would now have 50 BTC more than I currently have. But, no, I was not worried. I ended up investing that $10,000, and much more, in Bitcoin over the years, and increased my stash, but not as much as I could have. It didn't feel like worrying, but more like being "careful" and "gradual" in my investment moves, rather than throwing everything in straight away. I wish I had done that though. "Early bird" and all that...
Well, if you are talking about frontloading in around 2015 when the BTC price was bouncing around in the mid $200s for much of the year, then surely, that would have been a decent frontloading time, but there were so many of us who were considerable scaredy kitties during that time, and I am not even going to exclude my little selfie from such group - even though I continued to buy bitcoin during through out 2015 with reasonable spare extra monies that I would get in my cashflow.
I mentioned the story before that I had some pretty considerable cashflow interruptions in early 2015 that considerably stiffled me from buying any BTC from about mid-February 2015 until about May 2015 - and even after May 2015, I continued to suffer some decent stifling, even though some of the more emergency matters had been resolved - and that was not even really related to BTC in any kind of direct way - even though there could be causal claims to suggest that the overall BTC matter (and my approach to BTC leading up to early 2015) did not really help my abilities to deal with my early 2015 emergency situation.
But anyhow, once my cashflow began to resolve itself somewhat by mid-2015, I recall that sometimes I would have some cash flows of $20 or $100 or other varying amounts that would come in, and pretty much within a day or two of confirming that those cashflows had hit me, then I would purchase bitcoin with half of it.. hahahahaha.. those varying ongoing relatively small BTC (or would it be sats) stackenings did end up allowing me to add something like 8-10% (depending upon how calculated) to my BTC stash during a period in which my cashflow was somewhat challenged.
Another thing, for me, personally, even though I did some frontloading in my vary early stages of investing in bitcoin in late 2013 and going through 2014 - there ended up some later advantage in terms of my holding back on some of the frontloading and creating a 6 month budget (early 2014) to attempt to spread out my injections of fiat into bitcoin and then the next 6 months having another spread out budget (late 2014).
My conclusion still remains that whether we are talking about 2014 (when BTC prices were dropping) or 2015 (when they are largely flat and bottoming out) or even 2016 (when they were recovering), we could not really know exactly when would be exactly the better times to emphasize frontloading, buying on dips, dca or whatever because there might have been confidence in 2014 - but the damned BTC price kept dropping through the whole year.. and many of us had hardly any clue in 2015 (besides some hunches) that the bottom was mostly in, and even the recovery of 2016 may well have contributed to reservations about if there might be some better time in the future to buy bitcoin rather than buying as the BTC price was largely recovering through most of the year - looking in retrospect, we can see those matters.
About the various stages in Bitcoin management, I guess everyone starts with the accumulation stage, which, to me, spanned a number of years, from 2015 up to 2020, with my BTC purchases getting fewer and fewer (but sometimes larger) year by year. As of now, I do not buy BTC regularly, but I do spend my fiat on goods and services that I would not normally be spending on if I didn't own BTC. You see my point? Owning Bitcoin has enabled me to increase my fiat spending on things I want to have/do. There's no point in buying BTC when I will immediately convert back to fiat to buy something. I just buy it directly with fiat, and do not touch my BTC stash.
Yes, it seems that I can mostly see your point, but even your factual representations can raise other points.
Seems that your points in regards to actually materially knowing that you have higher wealth increases your options including your ability to leverage the value of your BTC stash in some kind of way, and it may not even matter so much which stage you are in, but instead how much profits you are in that might cause you to feel some freedoms in cashing out some BTC and having some flexibility in regards to if that ends up being a long term cash out or a spend and replace kind of situation.
So there could be other ways to frame the matter, even if you might be just considering the whole thing in a kind of way that you have been liberated in pretty damned solidly measurable ways - even if you have not gotten to "fuck you" status, yet (which there are likely levels to fuck you status, as well.. entry level fuck you status and also the kind of fuck you status in which you are manipulating various systems around you).
Losing BTC... No, never happened to me. Never lost a single sat. The few things I regret are some small (at the time) purchases using BTC, which are now worth thousands of USD. But I've never lost coins due to an accident, lost keys, etc.
Fair enough. Of course, there are using third parties too, such as exchanges, and we recently had the turkey exchange example, and of course some folks might experiment with new kinds of wallets (whether lighting related or otherwise), and sometimes there can be confusions that result in lost coins when experimenting with aspects of what bitcoin might be able to do or some limitations - and some easier solutions - and maybe even fear if too many coins might be held in one place, so there could be desires to store coins in a variety of ways, which also could end up on lost coins for some folks.. perhaps?
Even if BTC goes to zero (I'm being funny now...), I will still have my entire fiat investment capital, as if I never got involved in Bitcoin.
I have frequently pondered over those kinds of possible BTC price performance scenarios and how they might end up playing out in terms of my own personal circumstances and anticipated behaviors under such extreme (and seemingly unlikely) scenarios - especially in a kind of scenario in which BTC prices were to keep going down, including not really knowing and/or accepting the reason and actually some factual circumstances that might NOT be completely known by me and/or other normie BTC investors, and then under such cascading DOWNity BTC price movements, I would be continuing to think that this is a good time to buy because the price is lower and lower and lower, I act on those lower price moves (isn’t this feeling like some Bcash shitcoin scenario?), but as I keep buying, the BTC price keeps going lower than it had been and never really meaningfully recovers, even though I had continued to erroneously conclude that the bottom is in.
So, there could be BTC price points in which I
should stop buying and just save whatever it is that I had already bought.. but in such scenario, I don’t know when to stop buying because I did not get the memo that bitcoin is ded…
And sure, along the way, I may have well gotten some enjoyment of the hookers, lambos, and blow, but there may have been some things that are more solid in terms of my past investments that were largely enabled because of my having had been in bitcoin, such as property, or other longer term and non-depreciating investments that I made – and yeah, maybe various steak/lobster dinners could be counted too.. and maybe I did end up accomplishing some diversification (not talking about other cryptos, here.. .because I really doubt that there are any realistic scenarios in which BTC goes to zero but some shitcoin actually prospers (or takes over) in such bitcoin going to zero scenario.. not going to go to that level of nonsense with such hypothetical.. that shitcoiners frequently want to pump such a nonsense scenario)..
I very much doubt that BTC will ever drop below $10,000 (208-week MA, which is way higher that my average BTC buying price), let alone go to zero.
$10k is old newses.. you have to keep up with the times, and going up more than $200 per week now.. and it is around $11,400 - as I type... so yeah I agree that anything below $30k is likely not going to last too long, even if we go there, but I still find the 208-week moving average to allow me to attempt to be realistic in terms of how far the BTC price could go.. and likely also allow me to not give too many fucks, even if I am spending some BTC, because most of the time it is going to be above (and not even close) the 208 week moving average - and also I was really feeling $5k as a kind of point that causing me some hesitations - and sure we are not too likely to go back there either.. so I just feel liberated to do what I want, even though I cannot deny that i still engage in some strategies to attempt to time the waves and to sell as the price is going up and to buy as it is going down, to the extent feasible (and it does not get too much in the way of what I want to do).
In that sense, profits are virtually guaranteed.
Yep.... that's part of the point, too. The longer we are in, seems the more likely that we can make these kinds of assertions, whether we are considering lower numbers and saying our profits are 4x (from what we perceive as the bottom) or 2x or some other way of measuring the comfortableness of what we might be doing in terms of selling a bit extra and whether we feel compelled to attempt to buy back or not.
But, there's something psychologically appealing about being able to get back all of my fiat investment capital just by selling some leftover BTC dust that I have sitting unused in my Kraken account, and still be left with my healthy BTC stash, with a 100% certainty of profits (or, at worst, a zero-loss). I'm not saying that I will definitely sell that dust (I probably will not), but I like the feeling of being able to achieve 100% zero-loss certainty just by dusting Kraken and without touching my cold storage.
There could be some psychological symbolism going on there, and it becomes a kind of whatever floats your boat situation because if your overall profitability of your BTC holdings is in the 80x to 160x territory, there may be nothing meaningful happening beyond the symbolism.
Surely, we can measure great differences between even someone who is 10x or more into BTC profits and decides to take out his initial investment capital as compared with someone who might be way less, such as less than 5x in profits - so if you were to be ONLY 5x in profits and feeling some compelling need to take out your investment capital, you are depleting your BTC holdings by 20%, and sure that could be all fine and dandy with some folks to feel that they are not going to lose, even if BTC goes to zero, but it could have some meaningful negative impact on when they are able to pull the fuck you leverage when they have 20% less capital working for them at time 1, but then at time 10 there could have been considerable rippling effects of that 20% that had gotten pulled out that could have ended up having had caused enough of a cushion to feel comfortable pulling the fuck you lever at time 10 rather than having to wait until time 15 or some other inconvenient times, assuming that we hold all matters constant and there might not be any difference in the value in how much older a person may have become between time 10 and time 15.
Not sure if I'll go ahead with the above plan though... If it keeps pumping above $80k (which I'm sure it soon will), greed may take over.
Fair enough.
Sometimes I feel that I am kind of losing track regarding how much value I may have put into bitcoin (or not) and the various ways that such investment value might be tallied up.
With a quickie ballpark guestimation of my BTC holdings, I see that when BTC prices were as high as almost $65k, my investment amount would have been around 1.333% of the value of my total BTC portfolio (kind of cheating in term of how that is counted, exactly.. but whatever.. we are talking about ballparkenings of what is going on in terms of the investment of yours truly).
Now, let's say that BTC prices drop down to $47.5k (sure that is the current low within that past 8 hours or so), then my amount invested into BTC ends up going as high as 1.77%.. So around a $17.5k drop in BTC prices does not really seem to create any kind of real large changes in the ratio of how much invested I invested into BTC versus the value of the whole BTC investment portfolio holdings… and therefore the kind of financial and psychological cushion that exists, even with what appears to be about a 27% BTC price drop from about $65k to $27.5k (so far).
I do recall that in December 2018, BTC prices got down to about $3,124, and so at that time, the amount that I had invested into bitcoin was about 26% of the value of the whole BTC investment portfolio, so the move up from $3,124 to $47.5k seems to have made a pretty BIG difference percentage wise, and the correction from nearly $65k to $47.5k did not make a very BIG difference percentage wise… - but I am not going to deny that the numbers still look decently BIGgily with a $17.5k price drop –
Still a little bit more difficult to get worried about the whole matter as compared to if the BTC prices were to go way down, including if they were to start to get close to the 4 digits.. or even start to approach $20k-ish (seems quite doubtful.. but you never know). If we were to end up going down to something close to $20k, then my amount invested would end up constituting around 3.6% of the total value of my BTC investment.. The number would be getting BIGGER, but still seems to show that there is a considerable cushion for longer term BTC HODLers, even when BTC prices seem to be dropping outrageously – especially for those with larger average costs per BTC.
From these kinds of examples, some later BTC adopting peeps probably are realizing that the longer that a person is in the bitcoin accumulation and HODLing practices, the less bothered such OG HODLers inevitably seems to be affected by BTC price changes (whether corrections or even BTC price appreciations) that are more worrisome for the later adopters.
"Cushion" is the key word here. I fully agree, the longer one accumulates and HoDLs BTC, the softer that cushion becomes, almost to the point of enjoying bouncing up and down like a trampoline. Price drops, even big ones, do not cause fear, stress or uncertainty anymore. They could affect some planning and major life decisions, such as the size of the lake to buy, or when to say the final "fuck you" at work, etc., etc., but they will never really worry us too much, to the point of mindrusting some/all of our stash away, or not accumulating when we can.
Yeah.. I am not really sure when that feeling of cushion really kicks in, even though you are right to outline it as a kind of relative term, and also you made some implication that it could differ from person to person.. but some people might need to be in 3x to 4x profits before they start to feel the cushion.. or even 2x on an extreme drop.. Let's say, for example, your average cost per BTC is around $4k (which I know that I am kind of implicating the mindrust situation here), when BTC prices were dropping in 2018, 2019 and 2020, there was never established any meaningful level of confidence or assurances to the extent that such person was in profits, and sure I am not attempting to provide any excuses because each of us knows about strategies to continue to stay in the game rather than getting scared out because we want to retain profits by cashing out at $4,500-ish which is ONLY about 12% profits.
So far in Bitcoin's history, there has ended up coming a time for those of us with patience in which if we continue to buy, even if our costs might end up going up to $10k, but then we start to feel assured that the even the worst of the bottoms are still going to likely be at least 2x of our costs, so we are still in profits, and we can imagine (some of us more concretely than others) that the longer we stay into BTC (presuming some kind of ongoing BTC price appreciation in the long-term, even though scary ass times in the short-term) that profits get to be so, including that the extremes of the bottoms that we can reasonably project become so much
or so distant that we hardly give any shits.
So for example if our costs are less than $1k, then we attempt to imagine the worser case scenarios, which I had early mentioned that I was concerned about $5k as a kind of point of concern for me.. so imagine that my profits are only 5x at $5k (presumably bottom).. so then bottoming out amounts above that amount do not have much of any kind of concern, as you mention because if we bottom out at 20x above profits or 50x above profits, and sure 50x is better than 20x or 5x, and so far with the passage of time, in bitcoinlandia, we have been able to witness with the passage of time, the threat of the ONLY having 5x in profits becomes a further and further distance, and we end up becoming somewhat cocky because of our having such a great cushion in the value of our stash.
Now, I am not even suggesting any kind of panic or radical moves when profits are less than 10x or less than 5x are getting to be below 2x, but we still are likely to be more stressed and even having to engage in buying and accumulating and HODLing tactics when the size of our profits are approaching those lower numbers - which becomes more likely ON greater corrections, and so far in bitcoinlandia history has been coming up less frequently with the passage of time and the longer that we are in bitcoin as long as we do not panic and do too many dumb things along the way, including the mindrust situation... that seemed to have a few dumb things that set him up for such panicking - again not trying to excuse him too much.
During such times (price now may feel that way to some), newbies and weak hands tend to want to sell, but hardened HoDLers buy and/or HoDL, because we've already been through such times. 2014, 2018-20, tough shit. Would a 27% drop scare us? Hell no!
I think that we might still become a bit uncomfortable with some of the drops, but you are right that the drops are less concerning the more profits we have.. and I think that even if many of us might not really be materially affected if we shave off some profits at $47,500 versus shaving off some profits at $65k, but it does feel better to be selling (shaving off some profits) if the BTC price is either stable for a considerable amount of time or that it had been going up for a while and then we are able to shave some profits somewhere between $55k and $65k rather than somewhere between $47.5k and $55k - just saying.
But I will definitely sell some of that dust amount, just for fun reasons (cocaine, hookers and related items of debauchery & pleasure).
Overall you are not going to get any argument from me, whether some of your skimming off is merely for funzies, or symbolic because I surely do subscribe to variations of profit taking along the way, whether you start slowly at 2x, 10x or 50x or if you wait for some higher number, there is a point that it is reasonable to shave off some profits along the way in my thinkenings.. especially, let’s say for example, you have around a $1k per BTC cost per investment, and maybe that were to constitute a modest 1% to 5% of your total investment portfolio at the time that you had achieved such $1k cost per BTC, and if the BTC price goes up to your number of $80k, then your BTC value has likely dwarfed your various other holdings, whether stocks, bonds, PMs, properties, blah blah blah. So instead of being 1% to 5%of your total investment portfolio, your BTC holdings are surely in a kind of 90% to 95% range, and shaving off a few percent here or there is not really going to diminish your BTC holdings in any kind of meaningful sense, even though you largely may have ended up cashing out an amount that adds up to your initial investment value (or even more than that initial investment value amount).
Can't disagree with the above. I'm now almost all-in on Bitcoin (I was not initially, but Bitcoin took care of that, with its price appreciation over the years).
Yep. Through experience (and giving quite a bit of thought to the matter - and maybe I heard some other peeps making similar comments to what I was starting to believe), in about 2016, I learned to appreciate that there is a difference between allocations that are based on investing into the asset - and allocations that come from price appreciation.. so it does seem that those who are anxiously reallocating (including some funds that are required to engage in such frequent reallocations) are likely disadvantaged in comparison to individuals (such as us) or even smaller institutions who have more flexibility to allow their winners to ride.
I do keep a healthy amount of fiat stashed somewhere, to sustain me for several years, as a backup plan, but this is dwarfed by my corn side of things, even at $49k (or $39k, or $29k, or...). As for spending BTC, it's not an easy thing to spend probably the single most important and valuable monetary asset in the history of mankind.
Exactly!!! Makes it much easier to NOT spend your bitcoin, even though sometimes it might feel as if those seemingly BIG ass reserves of fiat are not really working for you, but still seems to give options.. even if they are not really earning anything and are likely depreciating in value (but even the depreciation of value of such reserve fiat may well be off set by appreciation (or likely) in BTC value with the passage of time).
I'm just using my monthly fiat income more liberally, and if at some point that's not enough, I'll be skimming some of the corn, but only when necessary. 1 BTC = 1 BTC only if you own BTC.
Edit: Fixed typos.
I think that I do that too.... These days - or the more that I am in profits, cash flows come in, and I do not feel any compelling urge to put such cashflow in my BTC investment fund, and just have such extra cash as available to spend as I wish... that way I do not really have to spend any BTC or worry if I buy something out of petty cash that might cost a few thousand dollars (even though like I mentioned in 2015, I would buy BTC with half of any cashflow that were to come in.. so $20 comes in and $10 gets spent on BTC.. and my then girlfriend would laugh at me as if I was being petty, blah blah blah).. and I wonder if she has any BTC right now? She was not a bad peep, we just seemed to have fallen out of touch, for some strange reason. Go figure ur lil selfie.
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