I prefer the old style of investors who accumulate bitcoins gradually but they don't sell them at every recorded ATH. why don't they sell because they know bitcoin is very limited. Whatever happens, buy bitcoin even if it's $10, do it gradually.
Could it be that we are getting our information from different sources because the information I have is that most early owners of bitcoin sold when they saw substantial profits. There are many articles suggesting that majority of the early investors have sold most of their bitcoins and I tend to agree with that because I have seen old thread of people here in the forum who had hundreds and thousands of bitcoin but have sold when they saw profit. If you check the discussion in
this article, you will agree with what I am saying and don't forget that it was only few people that saw bitcoin beyond a few hundred of dollars.
Those who invested early and are still holding, deserve special respect because they have foresight and are the true believers of bitcoin. I believe more people are holding now because they have truly seen how good it is to hold. Just like you suggested, many people are already seeing bitcoin beyond their generation because it should be one of the best things to hand over to the next generation. Just imagine my dad handed me over a paper containing the seed phrase to a wallet containing 10BTC, he would have eradicated poverty from me, my children and my grandchildren because even if I want to establish business outside bitcoin with part of that, I need just 1BTC to do that which means I can save as much as 70% of the BTC to hand over to my children after building a good house and putting in place other necessary things in place and also establishing a business.
I can see that you are seeming to describe some situations in which some early bitcoiner might have had a lot of coins and then presuming that the fact that they do not have as many coins to be a bad thing, when there are a lot of ways that the shaving off of coins over the years could play out. We can even backtest someone who had a lot of coins, and even if he might have had been fairly aggressively withdrawing coins over the years, such at a rate of 10% per year, he would still be really well off, and perhaps even better off for withdrawing coins along the way.
So for example a guy who might have had started out with accumulating in the ballpark of 1,000 coins towards the beginning of 2012, he might have had paid around $5k or $6k for those 1,000 coins (whether he lump summed in or maybe he bought over several purchases), and maybe he decides that starting in mid-2013, he would withdraw right around 10% of his coins per year - on a monthly basis (twice per month - which would be right around 0.4167% for each withdrawal 24x per year). In this kind of a scenario, over the last 11 years, he would have had withdrawn right around $7.2 million dollars (669.3 BTC), and he would still have right around 330.7 BTC remaining in his BTC stash size (presuming that he did not buy more BTC over the years, which currently 330.7 BTC is a bit over $22 million in value based on current prices. You can back test these kinds of numbers here (or input your own numbers):
https://bitcoindata.science/withdrawal-strategy?U2FsdGVkX1+iCmHSNWrLm2DpDph5lrzDu/TJtxZp7EJqBvgf/ap85eFc8YfZVrXtSyQxDfMd/+Sh+j9DpOirVw==In other words, I don't see any problem that the guy in this particular example ended up depleting right around 2/3 of his BTC stash over the past 11 years and extracting a bit over $7 million in value, and so yes now he only has around 1/3 of the quantity of coins that he had when he started in early 2012-ish, and surely it is likely he will never have that many coins again (the starting quantity of 1,000 BTC)....
I would suggest that it would not even be unreasonable for a guy in 2013 to start to conclude that he might have had accumulated enough BTC if had 1,000 BTC and they went from $6k-ish in value and to right around $100k in the middle of 2013 (valued at over $1million in late 2013 and even valued at more than $200k after the down correction of 2014 and 2015), yet at the same time, maybe such hypothetical guy would not want to start to cash out of his BTC so soon, so it could be possible that such guy with 1,000 coins would have had waited one or two years longer or maybe even longer before starting to employ some kind of a cashing out strategy.. .and maybe he would consider valuing his stash based on the 200-WMA rather than based on BTC spot price, even though we frequently gravitate towards the BTC spot price when looking at the value of our BTC stash, which could end up leading us to cashing out too many BTC too soon.. but then maybe buying back too.. which could devolve into trading and gambling, too - depending on the techniques that we might adopt.
Maybe part of my point is that frequently there might be too much emphasis in regards to BTC stashes going way down (being depleted) in quantity over the years, yet if the overall wealth is measured, it remains way more realistic for longer term BTC holders to be cashing out parts of their BTC stashes along the way rather than just sitting on their BTC stashes, especially once they started to reach levels of BTC accumulation (or even appreciation in BTC value) that it makes sense to engage in some reasonable forms of BTC withdrawal practices - whether they choose sustainable methods of withdrawal or not. ..
Yeah, surely if some BTC holders are practical about their withdrawal practices, it might be a bit dumb and whiny for them to be having regrets about what they could have bought with their bitcoin if they had held it and waited to cash it our later.. blah blah blah..
To me, it seems way better to figure out some kinds of reasonable and sustainable withdrawal practices, and not to whine about the matter - unless there are surely a lot of folks who end up engaging in BTC selling practices in which they sell way too many coins too soon, but there is no reason to engage in such practices of withdrawing too many BTC too soon in order to still enjoy the fruits of BTC price appreciation by working towards the employment of reasonable and meaningful withdrawal practices that might be based on time and/or prices.
In other words, with bitcoin there have been ways to both have your cake and eat it too, especially if whatever withdrawal system does not devolve into all or nothing kinds of plays that result in having regrets about selling too much too soon and mostly stays weighted towards holding most of the BTC rather than getting overly excited about cashing out large portions of the BTC stash into dollars.. and largely just shaving off along the way and even while potentially the amounts of the shavings had been capable of increasing quite a bit through the years, including 10% per year levels and perhaps even larger kinds of levels depending on how the withdrawals are structured or maybe just making sure that the BTC holder has enough value in the BTC holdings before starting the withdrawal practices... and those withdrawal practices could be structured with a combination of time-based and price-based practices.
I don't like to even make any sort of comparison between the peculiarity of our Bitcoin accumulation journey with earlier HODLers, they hard thier time and while some made the best of the opportunity, others gambled thier holding away and it's just a lesson for us to learn now and use whatever strategy that suite us to accumulate Bitcoin.
Yep.
A variety of strategies in terms of both accumulating bitcoin and then once we might reach some BTC accumulation goals, we might well not be relieved of how to consider and to employ some kind of maintenance strategy that makes sense, that would not contribute to our selling too many BTC too soon. We don't need to be greedy in order to think about and put into some practice a kind of maintenance and or withdrawal strategy that is reasonable.