You need to invest from your discretionary income, which is a fund you can afford to lose, that way you will not fear or panic if their is a dip in the market or your investment is not going as expected, because you know that even though the worst happens, you will still be fine emotionally and financially.
Of course this is a good rule for risk management. However, I think that investing only money that you can afford to lose does not completely eliminate fear, because many times, even with little knowledge about the market, people become unnecessarily panicked. So I would say, it is necessary to have a realistic idea of the natural volatility of Bitcoin before investing. This makes it easier to see temporary price drops not as losses, but as normal market behavior.
If you are investing money that you can afford to lose, then why would you give any shits about such money.
You might not understand the meaning of "money that you can afford to lose"
Another thing when the price dips you can keep buying, so let's say that the BTC price dips for 2-3 years or more, then you are just keeping on buying with money that you can afford to lose.
If you don't have money that you can afford to lose, then maybe you should not be involved in investing in bitcoin. You have the wrong mindset and/or not enough discretionary funds because you don't want to lose any of it.. and maybe if you enjoy eating ice cream cones (or marshmallows) you just want to buy ice cream cones (marshmallows) with all of your extra money?
Fear and panicking can never be taken away once you invest what you cannot afford to lose regardless of wether you are a newbie or a veteran investor, so it's very important that we invest only what we can afford to lose, if we don't want to be emotionally attached to our investment.
I consider this to be one of the foundations of long term investing. When emergency money are stuck in investments, every drop in value creates mental stress. I think investing in steps is also a good habit. This makes it easier to handle market fluctuations and the possibility of making wrong decisions due to emotions is also greatly reduced.
You seem to understand that idea of money that you can afford to lose, but you are not able to find a balance.
Let's say that you have $100 per week in extra money that you could put into bitcoin, yet you are afraid to invest that money into bitcoin. Therefore, you decide to invest $30 per week into bitcoin, but then that makes you afraid, so then you are thinking about investing $10 per week into bitcoin since you might not be afraid to invest $10 per week into bitcoin, but then the trade off of investing too little is that the small amount might not add up to enough to make a meaningful difference in your life.
In the end you have to figure out a balance and you know that you have $100 available each week, but you are afraid to invest that much.. so then you also come to the same conclusion about $30 per week, and you probably have psychological problems to not be able to detach yourself from your money. You have not figured out the right tool to cause you to say fuck it.. I will put in $30 per week and I won't give it much thought for 4-10 years or even longer... so then maybe you go to reassess where you are at at various times along the way, and so after 1 year, you had put $1,560 into bitcoin and after 5 years you had put $7,800 into bitcoin and after 10 years you had ended up putting $15,600 - then at that point you may well be regretting that you had been too whimpy and you had put too little into bitcoin.
Where is the balance? Figure out a balance that you are going to be happy with now, and then happy with in 10 years or longer, yet at the same time after 10 years (or maybe even 20 years of investing into bitcoin), there is no guarantee that you will have your original investment amount or you could have had lost all of it.
We take preventative measures to protect our bitcoin, yet there still are not any guarantees to be profitable in whatever amount we choose to put into bitcoin and whatever timeframe that we might start to cash out of some or all of our bitcoin.
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In order to start investing in bitcoin all you need is discretionary funds.
There is no need to add additional and vague ideas about supposed "basic knowledge" that is needed since guys can use their own judgement figure out what they need or don't need as long as they have discretionary funds, they can get started buying bitcoin.
They can also learn whatever they need to learn as they are starting to buy bitcoin on a regular basis, perhaps weekly?
People confuse starting with getting along but learning is constant so I believe he'll take note of that, i could remember sometime ago when you corrected me of something similar and I took note cause common sense should tell someone that they can't start without buying and to buy they need the discretionary funds which is what's used for investment.
Learning other things along the line can come later after buying, I believe that knowing how to buy or where to buy from shouldn't be complicated that people can't do research by themselves and figure it out.
I am not even proclaiming that any of the learning and becoming comfortable for the beginner is easy. Sure some things are easier than other things, but part of the adaptation and figuring out what to do or how to do it lies with the beginner bitcoiners who are needing to take responsibility if they want to transition out of being a no coiner into being a coiner.
Even guys who had been buying bitcoin for a long time, such as 2-3 years or even longer, they may also be feeling as if they are not making much if any progress, and I felt in similar ways in 2013, 2014, 2015 and a good amount of 2016, and then I had some issues with losing some coins in early 2017, so there can be quite a few difficulties along the way that we likely need to both go through, but also try to figure out how to tailor our own actions to our circumstances both related to our income and expenses, but also related to our psychology and various other matters related to our
9 individual factors, and it is likely that we are continuing to learn and even continuing to figure out if we are still in early accumulation status or if there might be some ways in which we might start to change how we accumulate bitcoin, even after we had spent a good amount of time already accumulating bitcoin and also (hopefully?) strengthening our cashflow management systems/practices.
And, we likely realize that my own experience might not even be translatable to someone who is brand new to bitcoin, even though there frequently can be times in which we have no idea whether bitcoin prices are going to go up or down, and the extent to which governments are attacking bitcoin and various other concerns about both bitcoin and about cashflow management issues.
Even figuring out bitcoin exchanges or other places to source bitcoin might not be easy, and some guys might have dilemmas about how they get their coins, how much it might cost and then at what point they might build up their bitcoin holdings while keeping them on an exchange (held by a third party) before they might want to take steps in holding some or even most of their own coins. And, even though they do not need to know all of these things before getting started, there can be challenges in learning and even some lack of comfort that has to be resolved so that a bitcoin newbie might start to feel that he can stack bitcoin and to feel comfortable about his building up a bitcoin stack, even if it might also tend to take time to build up a bitcoin stack, even if able to get over some of the initial hesitancies to get started.
