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Mining sucks in general.
If I simply purchased DCA in 2012 and held I would be a millionaire.
Although If I did dca from August 2012 to Sept 2013 I am pretty sure I would have cashed out too quickly in Oct 2013.
I have been a tinkerer more than anything else. I saw mining as a way to get good gear as a discount. I never imagined the beauty of BTC until fall of 2017.
So from 2012 to 2017 was a learning curve. I came to believe in BTC during this time.
2018 to fall of 2020 was a mining version of buy and hodl.
Spring of 2021 to now has been cool I will finally do okay and maybe in 3-4 years time become a BTC millionaire.
But fuck look at one of my old addresses
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/............[edited out actual address based on ditto with LFC regarding OPsec concerns/practices.. even though of course, peeps make choices regarding various information pieces to disclose.. yet I may well NOT need to play too BIGGEDly of an enabling role.. .. even though I am not totally clear of the underlying trade offs, either]I handled a lot of coin from 2012 to 2017
I just had no idea what BTC would grow to.
I gave away 10btc from 2014 to 2016 during the diff contests.
Then all of a sudden holy fuck this is a real thing.
Ah no use crying over spilt milk.
At least I do some hodl and stack now.
Personally, I doubt that it would be a fair expectation or representation to suggest that any of us should have held onto all of the BTC that we had transacted over the years, because that would likely be either impractical or infeasible to have been able to hang onto all of the BTC transacted.
However, I do agree with your overall point that setting aside more BTC over the years probably would have been a good thing to attempt to prioritize - but there still ends up being questions regarding how much would have been practical given your various ongoing expenses, risk tolerance and other individual factors...so sure in the end, we can likely presume that your amount of BTC retained would NOT have been even close to the whole 694 BTC, but sure we could imagine scenarios in which you may well have been able to retain a decently larger amount of BTC without ending up panic selling way too many of them too soon, even if you had retained way more of them.
So, of course, you are likely correct in identifying changes to your view of bitcoin as compared to other investments to have been one of your greatest changes in personal factors that have subsequently allowed you to conclude that it would likely be in your own personal interests to attempt to retain a larger portion of your BTC, as compared with your historical BTC retention practices.
I would suspect that there is NOT any longer term BTC HODLer who has not made some mistakes along the way, yet we should be able to appreciate that the best that we are able to do is to consider and perhaps tweak our current practices based on our learnings, and hopefully our tweaks actually contribute towards making matters better rather than either worse or just implementing some changed version of the same past mistakes.
Of course, each of us should conclude differently regarding what kinds of tweaks would work for our own situation, and I will admit that sometimes I will hear about some tweaks that guys make, and then I think, "holy shit, that tweak does not really significantly or meaningfully change much of anything in terms what issues (problems) it had been intended to address."
Huh? Am I really seeing what I am seeing?
Biodom proclaiming that "stock to flow" is an actual factor in bitcoinlandia?
Yeah but seriously ETH is a total scam shitcoin from day one and everyone knows its only existence is for professional theifs to bamboozle morons yet it reached a critical mass off greedy fucks thereby creating a perpetual self fulfilling machine. So anything that wasn't something can become something if enough people act as though it is, Perception can be stronger than reality on a broad scale. Not that I don't want S2F to be accurate just pointing out the obvious.
I am not even going to deny that perception of BTC price dynamics cannot end up contributing towards realities that end up playing out, and hopefully people do not put too many of their eggs in such baskets (such as baskets of perceptions blah blah blah) that are pretty damned inadequate and even lacking in explanatory value, even if you could well plug your perception of the world (including bitcoin) into such largely nonsensical and inadequate framenings.
In regards to my own perception of the various BTC price prediction models, including stock to flow, you likely realize that I take the various BTC price prediction models with a decently sized grain of salt, but I also tend to criticize some folks who are either completely ignoring the model or rolling some nonsense of their own model that may well fail/refuse to adequately account for the most credible and seemingly valid models that we have out there, which surely includes stock to flow, and stock to flow is coupled with 1) 4-year fractal (yes I know a wee bit redundant with S2F but likely deserving of such redundancy) and 2) exponential s-curve adoption based on Metcalfe principles and networking effects.