Yeah, sometimes we might be confusing the definitions, and it seems that bitcoin has a bit of a pattern that justifies the consideration of the 4-year cycle, even if the cycle may well end up getting broken at some point... however, if we already have a pattern of a 4 -year cycle, then, it is likely helpful to at least attempt to recognize that such pattern has so far tended to play around the timeline of the halvening.
So yeah we do not necessarily need to plan out 10 years or more in order to be considered long term, but if we really consider what people might want to do with their investment into bitcoin, then we likely can see that they are wanting to make their lives better in the future.... so yeah.. I suppose that there could be such things as long term, medium term and short term trades, and so any one getting involved in bitcoin for less than 4 years could be trading within various periods of time, yet it would be difficult to classify them as an investor in bitcoin if they have a timeline that is shorter than 4 years.
I thought that I had already sufficiently explained this.
If you are valuating your BTC stash from the bottom price, then you are going to have had established a cushion in terms of how many BTC that you need, and in BTC historically, the bottom price has continued to move up more than 20% on an annualized basis, and if you are ONLY withdrawing 4%, then your BTC stash is likely going to continue to grow, especially because you continue to measure it in terms of the bottom price, so once you get started, you may well need to increase your withdrawal rate to 10% or even higher. Of course, if you continue to monitor BTC's bottom price and it continues to move up faster than your withdrawal rate, then you continue to have a cushion and your BTC holdings continues to grow.
Let's say for example you felt that you needed $3.3k per month to live off of your BTC (which would be a $1million stash size at 4% withdrawal rate), and if you look at the current BTC bottom price, you will see that it is currently right around $32,200, which means that you need 31.1 BTC to reach that level, but if you were employing a 10% withdrawal rate, then you would need ONLY right around 12.4 BTC to achieve that same results in terms of being able to withdraw at least $3,300 per month..
You can look at the sustainable withdrawal tool, and plug in your own numbers to see how your own numbers play out (or your aspirational numbers) and to play with the tool.. and it seems that part of the trick is getting your BTC stash to a high enough level that you start to feel comfortable with starting to withdraw and including that measuring from the bottom value will likely allow you to not over do it.. but you still have to have enough coins and to not overly withdrawal, especially if you are still nervous about whether you have enough when you start to withdraw and to live off of them as compared to when you might have had been still in your BTC portfolio building stages.
The dollar has been decreasing its purchasing power, but not bitcoin, especially if you are using the 200-WMA as your way to valuate your BTC stash... so yeah, maybe you would not want to start to withdraw too soon if you are measuring that you need $3,300 per month in dollars, but that you expect that you might need $6,600 in the next few years, so then you might want to have a sufficient quantity of BTC as your extra cushion in order to account for the dollar value not going as far as it had gone previously..
That is why you measure from the bottom rather than the top, and also the tool reduces the withdrawal authorization amount if the BTC price is less than 25% above the 200-WMA.. yet even with a back testing of the tool, really aggressive withdrawal rates that go even greater than the 6% to 10% rate that I suggest to be sustainable would still have had been sustainable, even given the up and down years... that is one of the amazing things about bitcoin so far in its history.. even though its spot price has been pretty volatile, but if you had been measuring from 200-WMA, then you would have had been able to have an adequate cushion.
If you are still building your BTC stash, then you might not even be ready to start withdrawing.. so it may well be way better to keep building until you have enough, and BTC allows much greater withdrawal rates than traditional 4 % patterns which are still pretty whimpy as compared with bitcoin's ongoing powerful performance.
And yeah, no matter what you do, you have to feel comfortable with your withdrawal rate and to make sure that you account for all your expenses, otherwise you are jumping ahead of yourself if you have only accumulated a few BTC but you are expecting a $3.3k monthly income that keeps up with inflation.. .. but if you have 12.4 BTC or more, you are likely in good shape to be withdrawing that quantity and even withdrawing at 6% to 10% per year.
on the other hand, we could fairly assess that we might not have had realized that we were in a bull market until either mid-2023 or even as late as October 2023, but surely at some point, we would have or should have realized that we were in a bull market rather than a bear market since November 2022.
Bull market is that the price is generally trending up (even if there may well be short or long periods of corrections in between).
In other words, you cannot be flipping back and forth, and clearly even if we were in a correction in December 2023.. who gives any shits.. we were still obviously already in a bull market, even if there was a correction.
I think why I have always misunderstood this concept was because I was looking at it from a shorter time frame and getting confused due to temporal price correction and I was also thinking or assumed that when ever a dip occurs it was a bear market. I never knew that the market doesn't switch from bull to bear from time to time but rather stays on one trend for a longer time frame.
But I remember that it's good to have senerios or possibilities in short time frame and also longer time frames, where i could plan a set of different possible outcomes that could happen and prepare ahead which I've always been doing for a while now, but before now my focus has been on short time Frames without making preparation for a longer time frame.
Of course, any of us still wants to try to minimize his cost per BTC, but there is ONLY so much that we are able to do about those kinds of things, especially if we are new to bitcoin and still building our stash...
You are the one who was falsely proclaiming that we were in a bear market during your accumulation of bitcoin, which surely is not true.. .so maybe it is just best that you stop looking at the price at all.. and don't over invest.. just buy regularly some amount that you can tolerate if you may lose or not, and then after you have been through more than a whole cycle, then reassess the situation at that time.
In other words, you seem to be spending a lot of time worrying which way the BTC price might go, but why should that matter? Maybe you have a system and you have $400 per month that you could invest (which is $100 per week), so you invest 1/3 or that right away no matter what, and maybe the other 2/3 is used for making sure your finances are in order.. and then as you continue to study bitcoin then maybe you can change your amounts later on.. or if you are comfortable with 1/3 going to DCA right away, 1/3 building your emergency fund, and the other 1/3 to wait to buy on dips, if dips happen, and if they don't you just let that amount build up (which might be called your reserves).
In the end, you have to be comfortable with what you are doing, and if you are not comfortable, then maybe you are investing too much. It could be that you are investing beyond your level of knowledge and/or your level of comfort... so you just have to take it slower.. until you might be comfortable to become more aggressive.
I frequently have asserted that we should all try to be as aggressive as we can be without overdoing it, and if you don't know some of the basic price dynamics in bitcoin, then you might need to make sure that you are not being more aggressive than the level of your knowledge and/or your comfort.