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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.