You sound mixed up regarding what is "long term investing," and you may well not have any kind of specific timeline for when to get out exactly, even though you might have some ideas in regards to when you might start to need the money, whether that is 4-10 years or further into the future.
Sure having some specific goals into the longer term, such as 5 years or wanting to reach a certain amount, could have some relationships to long term or maybe overlap with the idea of long term or difficult to achieve goals that may or may not be reached... so some of the ways that you are framing long term could also fit within the category of long term thinking about investing.. . but you do not have to have any of those kinds of specifics...
You could have long term plans and intentions to stay with your investment 4-10 years or longer, while also recognizing that you have discretion to change your mind at any time or that you might want to make sure that you always have some ways of exiting the investment, even if you are not planning to exit, but you want to make sure that you can exit if you feel that you need to (or change your mind and want to).
Of course, you are less likely to be successful in your investment if you end up pulling out early.. so there is a lot of power in making sure that you can stay in.. but surely you also have complete autonomy over your own life and your investments, even if you end up screwing it up.. .. and there even could be some rare scenarios that getting out ended up being the right thing to do.
So then what is our approach as long term investors if we don't have any time frame in our mind for how long we would be holding or investing in bitcoin before we sell or start withdrawing, if we don't necessarily need to have a specific exit time, then what should we consider as our aim for holding, cause I do know that most persons approach investing in bitcoin with a profit making mindset and for a while in this thread I've been on the fact that long term holders(with our old definition as persons accumulate Bitcoin for a longer time frame) do have bigger benefits than short term holders for the many reasons we have also established.
If time frame or having a specific time I would stay as an investor or holder isn't what determines a long term holder what does?
I thought that I mostly already sufficiently explained what I meant, but let me see if I can give it another try.
Ultimately you are in charge of whatever you believe are your parameters for investing or to make your goals.
I think that my main negative reaction to Fuso.hp was the way he was specifically saying that a long term investor needed to have some kind of a specific timeline and maybe some other specific investment parameters at the time that he invests, and it largely sounded too strict to me, even if Fuso.hp might not be completely wrong.
Frequently it is proclaimed that we might be able to predict price or time but we cannot predict both, even though we might create various objectives in terms of timeline and we might even create certain objectives in terms of time, and maybe they might end up crossing over, but there are also circumstances in which we may need to have some flexibility too.
Let's say, that you start to invest into bitcoin, and you also have a real job, and you know that you are going to be quitting that job in 5 years and you are going to take whatever you have in terms of the job and also in terms of what bitcoin that you have at that time and you are going to start to live off of it and you have a specific location that you plan to move and you also have some planned activities and/or work and/or hobbies... and your Plan A will be followed as long as the total is above $1 million (combination of bitcoin and fiat), but if the amount is less than $1 million but it is at least $700k, then you are going to do plan B, which still involves quitting your job, but you have a another job that you will do in order to make up the difference so that you can follow plan A once you reach $1 million. You also might have a plan C that you would follow if the amount is less than $700k but more than $400k.
I don't see any problem with setting those kind of conditions on yourself, as long as you are being realistic about what is reachable and you have various kinds of plans for various contingencies. I just have problems when there are suggestions that you have to have specific plans at the time that you enter into your investment because some of the plans might develop as you go.
For example, you might say that you are going to invest and every year you are going to reassess, and you are anticipating making big changes in your plans after investing year 4, 8 and 12, and you are expecting to reach fuck you status by 20 to 30 years, but you are not exactly sure about what that is going to look like, but your plans to continue to assess every year and that you are likely to make big adjustments every 4 years could be tentative plans that end up working out or you mght make adjustments along the way based on how things are developing, so you cannot really nail down any specifcs from the start because at the very beginning you have hardly any clue about how it is going to go.
Maybe you start investing only in bitcoin at 10% of your income, but you know that would take you 10 years to get one year's salary expenses, so you have plans to increase your percentage and also to increase your income and to cut your expenses, but at the same time, you consider that you have to improve your skills and maybe even go to college in order to increase your income possibilities, and a lot of this takes time and you cannot necessarily know how it is all going to play out right from the start even though BTC could be a part of your plan (and maybe even an anticipated central part of your plan).
Your first paragraph is especially a good framing Wind_FURY.
In that regard, bitcoin provides us with a lot of various kinds of empowerment that is not merely about getting rich - even though getting rich seems to have had historically been an additional benefit that people have been receiving by building their BTC stash and mostly HODLing their BTC stash through many years.
Some people only come for the get-rich part of bitcoin and they are focused on the getting rich part and not even giving any shits about the empowering part, and surely some of these people will evolve in their thinking and understanding of bitcoin, but some of them will never get over the mere monetary focus, which I suppose in several senses if still valid, even though it is incomplete and somewhat superficial way of thinking about and understanding bitcoin... ..
even though as long as we keep building and holding our BTC, we can have very good chances of being able to end up doing both, too.. whether our original intentions had been exclusively on one or another, it still seems that both will continue to play out in the coming years.. and there are some who even say that it is inevitably based on math, even though many of us realize that it is not inevitable, yet bitcoin is a pretty amazingly designed system.. that is likely to persist and even to go up in value, which surely makes it more beneficial to any individuals to be sure to employ consistent, persistent, ongoing and perhaps even aggressive (without over doing it) accumulation strategies.
This is true, a majority of persons approach bitcoin for the get rich part, which has become more famous over the years because of the endless testimonies of people, a majority is still yet to be educated about any other empowerment bitcoin offers, and I think this is also based on usability and adaptation, most people still buy bitcoin for the sake of profit even if on the long term, this seems to be the case for me too and that's why I became a little confused and asked what should be our approach to bitcoin as long term holders.
You can come from whatever perspective that you like, and it is possible that you come for the number go up, but you stay for the revolution, or it could be that you come for the revolution and you stay for the number go up or it could be some variations of learning along the way and even changing the reasons that you are staying or perhaps choosing to leave. People who study bitcoin enough are not going to be too likely to leave, unless they are retarded or get distracted into shitcoins (but then they might end up coming back anyhow).
These are decent points about any decisions to sell when a person is wanting to get more BTC should be considered in light that the price might not ever drop back down, so usually the sell amounts would be relatively small, especially if a person is in BTC accumulation stages, and any one still accumulating is going to end up feeling quite uncomfortable if he sells some BTC but the price keeps going up and then he is accumulating a lot of cash and feeling a need to buy, so he ends up buying way higher than his earlier sell price.
So I think from this, it's not really bad to sell a little bitcoin with the aim of getting more bitcoin, but this could also backfire at you if the price goes higher and then you've sold your bitcoin holdings and you would have to now buy at a higher rate.
Yes, people make those kinds of mistakes, and it seems to me that if you are really early in your bitcoin investment journey then you might be way better off just buying regularly, ongoingly and persistently and trying to front-load into your BTC investment, and if you front load into your BTC investment, then you are likely going to be more informed how to come to balances in regards to how to allocate new money that you have coming in... yet almost no matter what you would likely have to go through a practice of ongoingly accumulating and tailoring to your own situation, and sure you may well end up making mistakes along the way and not being comfortable with your choices, but if you are ongoingly attempting to learn, you are going to have better chances to reach some kind of a balance that you consider to be good for you even if some others might conclude that you have not reached a good balance..
so the most important is that you are comfortable with your own way of balancing how much to put where, when to do your injections into BTC or other assets, how to manage your emergency fund, float and reserves... whether you might spend time trying to increase your employability to make more money or maybe it would be better to focus on cutting some of your expenses or making yourself more productive in terms of how you are spending your time.. which can also include taking breaks from time to time, too.. or even spending some money to relax, even if you might find that it would be better to put that extra money into bitcoin.. not easy choices... but no one can really tell you how to strike those balances and if your allocations are sufficiently aggressive without being too aggressive and whether there might be advantages to saving some for buying on dips or to hold less cash and buy more right now,..