You are not wrong justinlamode in that there are going to be certain times in which we might purposefully hold back buying BTC right away and try to buy on dips, yet we are not going to necessarily know if that is a good idea, since sometimes there can be several false senses that they BTC price is going to drop, and it ends up doing the opposite - which surely ended up being the case for those guys who might have had been holding back too much value in September/October 2023 - even though it may have worked out for guys who held back in around April/May 2022, there is no real strong information that BTC's bottom might have reversed a lot earlier snd a lot higher than it ended up reversing in that late 2022 time period in which largely the BTC price kept dropping - and maybe there were also a lot of guys who largely ran out of money during that time since the BTC price was dropping more than what had been thought to be reasonable and/or feasible - so any of the guys who ended up doing better during that time, might have been largely lucky, and at the same time there were quite a few of those guys who were sitting on decent amounts of cash in the lower $20ks and even through out the late 2022 dip down $15,479 who were waiting for the BTC price to drop a lot lower, such as under $10k or $12k or even sub $14k- and some of those guys ended up being too greedy for their own good...
At the same time, anyone still able to DCA throughout that whole time, might not have had a lot of cashflow, but still could have ended up profiting by largely staying consistent during that time when market signals were not exactly straight forward, and even the DCA-er would still have been o.ik. even if he had been DCAing at either of the tops in 2021 - (either the April one or the November one) and just continued to engage in ongoing DCAing during that whole time... especially if he was planning to be in BTC for the long run and he was not claiming to know much of anything what was going on with BTC's short term price happenings, but just having confidence that in the next 4-10 years or longer (or whatever his particular longer term investment timeline), he figured that the odds were pretty decent that BTC's prices would end up being higher rather than lower.. (not 100% confident, but at least confident enough to just stay persistent, consistent and ongoing with his accumulation of BTC).
So, I don't really have any problem with anything that you had posted justinlamode - except for any kind of implication that an overwhelming majority of guys are really going to have hardly any clue about which way the BTC price is going to go in the short-to-medium term... so yeah, they can hold back some of their dollars just in case, yet they still likely are going to be careful in regards to holding back more than what would be in their best interest, especially if the BTC price would have ended up not having the dip that ended up happening... so frequently, any guys serious about BTC accumulation (and attempting to do it as prudently aggressively as they can), they are going to have to end up entering compromises with themselves in terms of just sucking up the fact that the BTC price might drop and just ongoingly buy at whatever is the then price because it remains the most reasonable thing to do, even if sometimes their cost per BTC ends up higher (also the quantity of BTC that they end up accumulating ended up being less for those particular purchases - even though if they consistently are buying BTC, they still likely have good chances to end up with more BTC rather than the guy who is ongoingly waiting for dips and trying to outsmart the market)
You do not have to DCA, and surely the fact that you have a lump sum that you want to invest into bitcoin, even if you are transferring from some other asset, that provides you options that some guys who have no extra sources of cash might not have.. and one of the powers of DCA is for those who do not have lump sum.
So there can be quite a few various strategies that a lump summing guy might employ, including that he might decide to lump sum and then to NOT invest any more into bitcoin, unless the BTC price moves against him (meaning if it moves down rather than up), so then he could have various extra funds on the side (or just a DCA amount) that he would start to employ if the BTC price moves down a certain amount.. and whether that is called DCA or buying on dip or some variations, those could be ways that guys could plan ahead in such ways that do not necessarily involve ongoing DCA.
One of the risks of lump summing what is thought to be a large amount is that a guy who fails/refuses to continue to invest into BTC, he might later come to regret that his invested amount is way lower than what it should have been or could have been, so even though DCA and buying on dips can supplement any BTC buying approach that started out with a lump sum, it is not necessarily the case that every guy will employ such practices, and it is not even necessarily going to be a good use of the guy's capital if he might be motivated by other kinds of balances, and he is not limited in his discretionary income or perhaps he might choose that he has other priorities in life and he is not trying to be as aggressively as he can in bitcoin but that if he had invested 5% to 25% or whatever he ends up investing into bitcoin, he might consider that to be a sufficient enough stake and he is not necessarily going to feel pressured to revisit his investment until several years later.. ..
and so whether the guy is wrong or not in his approach, and even if he might be advantaged by DCAing and buying on dips, he might have already decided how he is going to approach bitcoin in a more modest way that still ends up allowing him to take a fairly decent stake in it, even if some of us might conclude that he is being too whimpy in the way he had chosen to invest in bitcoin. In this regard, there are some folks who ONLY lump sum in the ways that they invest, yet if they keep doing it over a period of time, it might become a bit ambiguous regarding if they are actually DCAing, even if it might appear to be lump sum investments that are once a quarter, twice a year or some other longer kind of increment that might not be as practical for some one of more modest means and who only has limited cashflow in which something like weekly DCA would more likely be the better way to go for guys of more modest means and who are reliant on sometimes variable cashflows.
You could have a guy who gets lump sum incomes on a regular basis, and every time that he receives it he invests 80% of it into bitcoin. Even though it seems like a lump sum, it also seems like DCA because he is largely investing into bitcoin based on how much income he has coming in and also his decision to invest into bitcoin likely means that he is considering that extra amount to be discretionary/disposable income because his expenses are largely already covered by other money that he has coming in on a regular basis.