I was going to say a similar thing to Iroh, and he has been registered on the forum since May 2022, yet perhaps he has been thinking about bitcoin for the whole time that he has been registered here, yet he has been and continues to be failing/refusing to get the fuck started..
So then, nearly 4 years and has he started to buy bitcoin yet? if not? when is he going to start? He does not seem to be in a good place to be giving advice, if he has not yet started investing into bitcoin.
If Iroh had started investing $100 per week into bitcoin starting in May 2022 until now, then he would have nearly 4 years investing into bitcoin, and he would have had invested right around $20k into bitcoin, and he would have had accumulated right around 0.5 BTC, which would be a really great place to be right now based on $20k invested over a little less than 4 years.
I think that a lot of normal people would like to be in a place as to have had gotten themselves of holding 0.5 BTC for some thing like $20k invested over a little less than 4 years..
I agree with the sentiment that you can't truly understand Bitcoin until you own some. There’s a psychological shift that happens when you move from observer to holder.
If Iroh had just started with even $10 or $20 a week back in 2022, the technical hurdles (wallets, seed phrases, etc.) would be second nature by now. Analysis paralysis is the biggest portfolio killer.
Better to be a clueless buyer in a bear market than a genius observer watching the ship sail from the shore.What then happens after the bear market? Do you stop buying? Is it not better to be intentional about your bitcoin investment journey rather than being clueless?
Of course it is better to be consistent in your regular buys than buying only during the bear market. Investors should strive for their regular buys not to be seasonal, but consistent over a longer period to build out a descent bitcoin portfolio for themselves
Of course, many of us participating in a forum like this are already interested in bitcoin and likely studying into bitcoin, and surely guys are going to come to bitcoin with varying levels of knowledge and conviction.
It seems to be o.k. and acceptable to start out investing in bitcoin from wherever we might be, even if we might not have very much knowledge. So, we just figure out some comfortable amount that works with our budget to put into bitcoin and perhaps with thought of merely having some bitcoin as an option.
It would also seem that the longer that we are in bitcoin, then the more motivated we should become to look into bitcoin more, and to understand the thing that we are buying. We cannot force the interests of any other person, even though it may well be a good idea to learn more and more about bitcoin as we are investing into it, which includes learning how to self-custody it. One of the barriers of self-custody continues to be the need to invest more into bitcoin and the learning of bitcoin and even making sure that you do not lose your bitcoin, since self-custody requires responsibility to make sure that the keys are not lost, otherwise the access to those bitcoin will be lost, so the higher the value, the larger the loss - which may be part of the reason that some guys do not want to move away from third-party custody or maybe they try to figure out ways to jointly custody so that they do not have to have all of the responsibility of safeguarding the value of their private keys.
The value of the BTC holding may well not seem like it is getting larger, but then perhaps all of a sudden, the price goes up, so then the value becomes much more than what it had previously been. We can never really know for sure if bitcoin's prices are going to change to the upside or to the downside, so if the prices are going to the downside, then every weekly buy (whether it is $100 or some other amount) gets more satoshis for the same quantity of dollars invested, then if the BTC price goes shooting up, those same accumulated satoshi start to seem like a lot of money. I know quite a few guys who had been keeping relatively small amounts of bitcoin in various wallets in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and maybe they had some wallets that were a few hundred dollar, and then other wallets that had a few thousand dollars and so when the BTC price went from $250 in 2015 to $19,666 in late 2017, that was a fairly short period of time, and so we could imagine that a wallet that might have had $500 (2 BTC) would have had become worth $39k at the peak in late 2017, and a wallet with 40 BTC ($10k) would have had suddenly been worth around $780k at the peak in late 2017.
It is also important that the investor has an idea of what he is doing and how to go about it rightly, I do not buy into the clueless buying because if you're clueless, you may as well be going about it in the wrong way and may be using money for your projected expenses to buy and when it is time to undertake such expenses, you'll cash in your portfolio and as well end up like the friend described in the OP.
It is true that in the beginning we might not need to know very much, and in the beginning we may well be focused on building our position and perhaps learning the basics of our cashflow management and how to accumulate bitcoin.. yet the more and more our bitcoin grows through our adding to it and potential price appreciation, then there is a need to learn more, at minimum so that we do not end up panicking and we have some plans regarding how to deal with our bitcoin in the case that the price changes, whether the price is going up, down or sideways. And, surely there have been guys who regret when they did not have a plan, including in 2017, there may well would have had been several guys who panic sold their bitcoin in late 2017 when the price went between $2k and $4k, and if they ended up selling all of their bitcoin, the price did not correct back down to those levels in 2018, 2019 or 2020, so they might have had regrets in their not being able to buy back at the prices that they sold, and perhaps the ones that did the best, ended up buying back in at a loss, and others became bitter about bitcoin and would not buy back in, since they were not able to buy back the same quantity of bitcoin that they had sold.
It is important that you are buying and also very important that you know how to buy rightly like buying from part of your discretionary income and building backup funds simultaneously in the process so you'll have more financial options not to tap into your portfolio in case of emergencies. It is also good having an accumulation target and not taking short-term profits.
All of these ideas make more sense when they are put into practice, and surely some guys will go heavier into bitcoin than others, so frequently, even modest bitcoin position ends up being better than the position of the guys who chose to completely stay out of bitcoin.
