I recall in about 2017, a person came to me, and he bought around $5k worth of bitcoin and the BTC price was then around $15k, so let's say that he got around 0.333 BTC for the amount that he gave me, and about 6 months later he came back to me, and the BTC price was around $6k, and he told me that he wanted to sell his BTC back to me. I told him that I thought that it was a bad idea. I told him that if he had been in for the long term when he bought then he should either just wait it out or he should be buying more BTC and not selling BTC, yet he told me that he needed the money, and so I told him no problem. I will buy back his BTC, so I ended up giving him right around $2k for the same BTC that he had bought for $5k...and I am not even sure what happened to him because I had ONLY met him for those two transactions and he is the one who would be responsible for his decisions regarding when to buy and when to sell, and I personally was an overall buyer, since any time that I sold bitcoin during those kinds of times, I would replace my bitcoin (buy and replace), so my selling and then subsequently buying bitcoin from him did not really make much of a difference to me in terms of my overall BTC balance at that time, except maybe I would have had skimmed a few percentage points off the top in order to accumulate a bit more BTC out of the deal.
It is a good example how individuals can be driven by financial constraints to book losses when they take entry in Bitcoin market with the sole intention to make quick profit without implementing any form of risk management strategy. Your decision to buy back Bitcoin at lower than your initial selling price was a well thought decision rooted in your long term strategy. This scenario underscores that inherent volatility of Bitcoin market is a gift for those who know how to effectively manage risk.
Yes.. it is a kind of sign of failing to sufficiently plan, and not being prepared to continue to buy if the BTC price were to fall or at least to HODL through the BTC price drops, and yeah it could take 3-5 years or even more for some of our BTC purchases to get back into profits if the BTC had ended up going down after our purchase.. and one of my personal solutions had been to continue to buy BTC even when my average cost per BTC may have been higher than the current price, and so maybe it still takes a while to get into profits (and sure it is not guaranteed to get into profits), but when the average cost per BTC comes down, then the threshold for getting into profits becomes lower and lower, and with an asset like bitcoin, the odds seem pretty decent that the price trajectory is UP, even though there may well continue to be long periods of down and/or flat BTC prices along the way.
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This is the best example of cryptocurrency failing to positively impact the economy and the masses.
You likely would not know a good example if it slapped you in the face.
Most likely you need to zoom out a bit, and if you were even attempting to be honest in your posts, you would be able to appreciate that bitcoin is amongst the best performing of broadly distributed assets of the past 10 years or so, and perhaps even the best.
Sure, there is no guarantee in regards to the future.. so position sizes should be adjusted in order to account for such lack of guarantee regarding where BTC might go in the future, even though its asymmetric UPside nature, likely suggest that it is good to have some stake in bitcoin, whether that is $100 or $1,000,000 or some amount that might be reasonable in regards to your budget. In recent times, I have tended to recommend somewhere in the ballpark of 1% to 25% of any persons quasi-liquid investment portfolio, yet of course, people need to choose their own levels within that range or even outside of that range if they have some kind of a rationale for going outside of that range and at the same time, every person is responsible for his/her own allocation decision(s), including if their decisions happen to be NOT to invest at all into bitcoin, which is also a decision.
90% of the world's population doesn't even have a more or less significant "financial cushion"
Well if they have no discretionary budget, then they likely are not in a position to invest into anything, so it would be stupid to invest into something if there is no discretionary income.. as you suggest.
, and most importantly, they have no financial education or idea how it all works.
You sound a bit patronizing.. and presumptuous. I would think that it is in the interest of every single person to figure out his/her budget and to figure out ways to either live within his/her means, and to also use debt (if s/he has any credit or ways to use debt) in ways that are wise and within the parameters of his/her personal cashflows.. and sometimes it is not prudent to even use debt if a person might not even have discretionary income, as you suggest.,. The use of debt is a more advance technique of building wealth that would only come after a person makes sure that s/he has his/her shit together in terms of personal finances and budgeting.
The almost total majority of "hamsters" (home users) who rushed to buy crypto in 2017-2021 - were focused on the fabulous prospects of getting rich "in a week". In the end - all of them suffered losses, as they were simply neither financially nor morally ready to invest for a long period of time.
If cannot figure out a long term way of investing into bitcoin, then maybe you deserve to get recked, and I would not blame bitcoin for the gambling mentality that is inculcated into people based on various broken fiat system incentives.
Yeah people feel like they have to gamble, so the approach a lot of things, including but not limited to bitcoin, with short-term thinking and short-term ways of considering getting in and out of their investments (which is most likely not investing but instead variations of gambling), and sometimes they might do o.k. with those in and out techniques, but it is likely that a majority of people getting in and out of something like bitcoin and failing/refusing to recognize bitcoin as a long term investment are not going to be able to advantage themselves by taking a more prudent/practical approach that might well be aggressive towards their bitcoin investment without crossing into overly aggressiveness.
So anyone who had been investing into bitcoin in a kind of solid way (such as using regular DCA buying) since early 2017 is likely doing quite well right now. Take a person who had invested
$100 per week since January 2017, by now such a person would have invested around $35k and would have accumulated right around 5.3 BTC, so surely not a bad place to be, even for someone who might have had some periods of high cost BTC and low cost BTC throughout that whole period.
So yeah there are ways to describe people who were not consistent and who bought their BTC high and sold low, but those are likely not problems with BTC because you can tinker around with that same DCA website variables that I had linked in order to see that the longer that you are investing into BTC, then more likely it becomes that you are going to end up being in profits, and sure maybe the person who has been DCA investing into BTC for only 2-3 years (or who got into BTC when BTC prices were going above $30k in early 2021) might barely be at break even BTC costs per BTC as compared with BTC prices, and might not even be in profits after nearly 3 years in bitcoin. but still does not seem to be a bad place to be, even if we look at a person who might have started buying
$100 worth of BTC since January 2021, and such a person may well have ended up putting close to $14k into BT and have right around 0.5 BTC right now.. so not quite in profits.. and barely break even if we get back up to $28k... but still does not seem to be a bad place to be in terms of having hedges and having options.
And these 90% of the population have a need for money - daily.
Well, sure people might well be living paycheck to paycheck, but people do not tend to get paid daily, so maybe they get paid weekly, monthly or twice a month, and so they have to budget for their expenses for the whole month. .in which they might have daily allowances and/or some ways of measuring their expenses in order to figure out how much they can spend based on how much they make.
And here volatility plays a cruel joke with them - they go to buy their last 5000 dollars bitcoin, and a month later... sell it for 2000 dollars. And their life gets even worse. It will be the same with the economy, which someone will try to build in the current situation, on bitcoin. That's what we need to prove.)
You did not even get my example correct. I said that the guy had bought with $5k, and then around 6 months later, he came back and got around $2k for that, and it was a bit of a sad situation, but he has to take responsibility for his own finances, and if he did not have $5k to invest into bitcoin, then probably he should not have used that money, and maybe he would have been better off to buy BTC at $833 per month rather than $5k all at once, and maybe he should have ONLY been spending $500 per month ( which is the amount that he ended up losing, so we know that he could have afforded $500 per month since that is how much loss he ended up locking in).
Maybe we can look at the DCA calculator in order to specifically look at his example.. and I had to go back, to the price charts for this.. so If he had bought
$500 per month (or $116 per week) starting from January 15, 2018, then he would have accumulated a bit more than 0.36 BTC, which is actually more than he had bought for $5k at that same time in early January 2018.. so the amount of $3k that he ended up losing could have almost been like free BTC with a prudent, practical and ongoing BTC accumulation strategy that might involve something like DCA buying.
And yeah maybe he could have even invested his whole $5k over 6 months and he could have ended up getting more than 0.62 BTC and perhaps not panicking with the BTC price movements at that time which was around a 60% price drop at that time, and that we know ended up dropping even further for that period, since the BTC prices did end up going down to $3,124 in November 2018.. before returning back up and not returning to those sub $5k prices, except in the March 2020 crash event.
That's why there is no positive answer to the simple answer - which country/economy bitcoin helped to improve the situation - no positive answer.....
There's a positive answer if you are willing to open up your eyes and figure out to deal with volatility, since one of the most inevitable things in bitcoin is that it is going to continue to be volatile, and there are ways to deal with that in order to see the positivity of the matter both financially and psychologically.