That is not true. If you consider that the meaning of taking profits is that you have gotten more dollars, and then you take profits in dollars, your dollars might not be holding value as well as you believe that they are, and so you are being mislead about the benefits of taking profits and/or even when it might be prudent to "take profits." Another thing is that if you look at bitcoin over the long term, then even if there is a lot of up and down volatility, the ultimate direction of volatility has been in the upwards direction, so taking profits from the most sound (pristine) asset that has ever existed may well end up putting you on the wrong side of the greatest wealth transfer of our time (and perhaps in history).
We are here to discuss every aspect of the issue.
I don't have any problem with the idea in regards to talking about the advantages and disadvantages of holding and/or ways to potentially game the profitability of up and down BTC price moves - especially since the topic does have potential for exploring those kinds of angles. Accordingly, I had not criticized your post for being off topic, but instead attempted to criticize your seeming presumption that trading in and out of positions would automatically be advantageous even if dollar profits might be assessed to have had taken place.
For you, Bitcoin is a store of value, and your main source of income lies elsewhere. But what about other people, maybe Bitcoin trading the main source of profit for them?
Of course, if you do not have any other income and you are striving to get income from trading, then you might be in a bit of a pickle in terms of how to invest and/or set aside value in such a way that you are able to profit from the investment (in this case bitcoin) as an investment and also to be able to get the compounding value out of it that tends to come from abilities to hold it in the longer term rather than short term scalping of dollar value.
Shouldn't they be able to trade their Bitcoins to make a profit to feed their families?
Of course, if someone does not have any other source of income, they have to generate income in some kind of way, and if their most profitable way to get income is by trading BTC and/or other kinds of trading, then that would be their circumstances and they still might need to assess the extent to which they are advantaging trading bitcoin as compared with other less pristine assets that they might trade.
I am not even proclaiming that anyone is able to invest into bitcoin or anything else unless they have some level of discretionary/disposable income. So if someone does not have discretionary/disposable income, then they are not in a position to invest. By the way, discretionary/disposable income is the extra income that is available after expenses are paid, so in other words, people who do not have discretionary/disposable income are not in a position to invest, and if those people are buying and selling bitcoin then they are gambling, trading and/or generating income and they are not investing... so investing still could come if they ended up generating more income than their expenses, so then if they have extra income that would be discretionary/disposable income that they could invest and/or use for extra consumption purposes
It would be their choice whether to invest with their extra income.. and part of the dilemma for the trader/gambler/someone generating income from trading is that they will frequently be tempted to use their extra income for trading purposes rather than investing with that extra income.. which could come back to bite them in the ass several years down the road when they might end up not having shit to show for all of the income that they generated through the years, but did not invest any of it but instead just traded with any extra income that passed through their hands.
And maybe the accumulated money they earn from short-term investments will be accumulated by them in Bitcoin? not fiat currency, so short-term Bitcoin trading is just their job (trader). So, what's wrong for you doesn't necessarily mean it's not right for others, right?
I did not say anything is wrong for me. I was attempting to describe the historical power of bitcoin as an investment and the likely continued ongoing power of bitcoin as an investment, and in the end, guys can do whatever they like, even though they might end up shooting themselves in the foot if they presume that there is value to take profits in dollars.
Of course, as you mentioned, profits could also be taken in bitcoin, but if they put that bitcoin capital back to work and they are trading with it rather than setting it aside, then it would be much more difficult to consider any aspect of their bitcoin approach as an investment, unless they were to have some kind of system in which they are building their bitcoin in a way that does not unnecessarily put it at the extra risks of trading with it.
One of the errors that people sometimes make, even with bitcoin, is that they wrongly conclude that there is some kind of need to earn yield or to generate profits on their BTC, which surely could end up being problematic if the bitcoin have to be stored or held by others in order to generate such yield, and if we assess bitcoin as an investment, it is already designed to pump forever in terms of its sound money attributes, and so there is no need to put your bitcoin at extra risk in order to be able to be advantaged from its sound money attributes that are more and more likely to pay off the longer that the bitcoin is held...
In recent years, I have become increasingly bothered by attempts to evaluate bitcoin value based on spot price, even though spot price is relevant for any time that a person is going to buy or sell bitcoin - so I have tended to gravitate towards the 200-WMA as a great tool for evaluating bitcoin value - and especially becomes more and more useful for guys holding their coins for more than 4 years, and maybe even better if they are using such valuation mechanism when they are holding their BTC 4-10 years or longer.
Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to totally poo-poo the idea of earning income from trading, because there surely may be places in which a person is able to earn more from trading rather than from doing regular work that is available in the area or available based on the persons skills and/or job experiences - even though skills and job experiences can be built up in order to increase income. So there are trade-offs to any profession and/or how one chooses to spend time to generate income. At the same time, I can appreciate that there can be difficulties for anyone to engage in investment practices, whether he has a separate job from trading or if his primary (or only) source of income is from trading.
So there can be a lot of discretion regarding how much to set aside from income for investing, and through most of my life I had been saving and/or investing 10% of my income, and in my earliest years, the 10% was not very much, and there were quite a few struggles with that including figuring out where to put it, but it still can add up over the years. I also know from my own experiences, that an overwhelming number of people are not ready, willing and/or able to even set aside 10% of their income for savings/investing. You are not necessarily free from those kinds of considerations merely because your income source comes from trading, but I can see how a trader might have difficulties setting aside separate "don't touch" funds because there can be some value in terms of generating enough working capital in order to increase the size of his trades with the passage of time, but he still may well need to be setting some of his generated funds aside into some kind of classification of "don't touch" funds which would be considered long term investment/savings, even if he might have other funds that are his "working capital."
In long term investing, besides being narrowly focused on profits, you can also think in terms of potentially having more options, especially with an investment like bitcoin that is likely better able to hold its value as compared with the dollar or any other asset that might be held.. so if you hold long enough then your investment likely compounds upon itself, so then you have way more options if you are 3x to 5x to 10x to 50x up in profits as compared to taking simple profits that are less than 100%, which a lot of folks tend to be taking profits way too soon and then they end up interferring with bitcoin's compounding process. Look at the power of compounding
in my post that includes some examples.
I agree with you about the
power of compound interest, holding and accumulating a valuable asset for a long time will bring huge profits.
In the case of bitcoin, it is not really compound interest, but instead compounding value, but it is a similar idea. One of the problems with compound interest is that someone would need to pay you for that, and bitcoin is already designed in such a way that there is no need to take the extra risk for any kind of interest that you might gain from turning your bitcoin over to a third party. ON the other hand, if there are ways to earn interest on BTC without extra counter-party risk (or only minimal counter-party risk) then that might be acceptable in some circumstances, but in bitcoin's base investing case, it is not necessary to earn interest and/or yield from it, since bitcoin is already designed to pump forever (or increase in value forever if you prefer a more neutral way of saying it).
Certainly, long-term investments should be several years or more (based on Bitcoin's growth cycle, 4 years or more is ideal), but what we are considering are ideal investment conditions when we have a stable source of income, and are not too old. For older people who don't have much time left, or those whose income is not very stable, should they not invest in Bitcoin in the short term?
Of course if your investment timeline is less than 4 years, then it may well be problematic to call that investing. Of course, as an individual you can do whatever you like in terms of assessing risk and market price movements in shorter time periods, but that may well be considered as trading or gambling rather than investing, and likely in need of position size reduction in order to account for the additional risk that comes from shorter term plays. In then end people can do whatever they like, but from my perspective it is problematic to call less than 4 year stents in bitcoin as investments, so there could be some quibbling going on here in terms of what to call it.. or how to play such short-term stents in bitcoin, if any one chooses to allocate value into bitcoin for shorter than 4-year timelines.
Bitcoin is a good asset, but everyone's investment taste is different, and each person's holding level will also be different depending on their conditions, not everyone is in ideal conditions to holding an investment for too long a period of time.
This is sounding a bit like a quibble over semantics, if you want to proclaim that some forms of trading still should be considered as "investments," which might not be totally wrong, even though for me it seems to mish-mash the concepts if you cannot attempt to figure out some kind of way to differentiate trading/gambling from investing... and don't get me wrong, I do agree that there are some guys who are able to structure their trades in such a way that they are never going to lose, but that is not the case for typical normal people. Learning how to make trades profitable under all conditions is a learned skill, and some guys are better at it than others. Investing tends to take a lot fewer skills, especially in the realm of mostly honing personal financial management skills in order to accurately calculate discretionary/disposable income and to invest within the parameters of such discretionary/disposable income which likely also includes figuring out ways to maintain and/or manage emergency funds, reserve funds and monthly cash floats.
So yeah, I mentioned that I consider bitcoin to have a 4-10 year or more investment timeline, which is also supported by the information contained in the OP of this thread. Of course there are other places to hold money that might have shorter-timelines and/or more guarantees not to lose money, so yeah people do need to account for their timelines in terms of where to keep their value or even how aggressive they might be in their employment of various investment approaches.
The ultimate purpose of investing or accumulating valuable assets is still to serve our lives and future generations, right?
That sounds correct, yet maybe I would probably phrase it a bit differently, which might be something like the deferral of gratification today in order to have the potential of having more options in the future, whether that is for oneself or for passing to heirs. At the same time, there are going to be balances between how much to spend/consume today versus how much to save/invest, and of course, there likely would be preferences that the savings/investments at least hold current purchasing power and potentially increase in purchasing power, while at the same time there is continuous uncertainties in terms of how to save/invest in order to not lose future purchasing power... which get's us back to the idea regarding why bitcoin is likely to serve a large role in terms of the allocation of savings/investments,
and perhaps part of the reason why between 2014 and 2020 I moved from recommending to newbies (no coiners and/or low coiners) 1% to 10% in bitcoin (and during that period I would frequently suggest to just get off zero), and then from 2020 to 2023, I started to recommend 1% to 25% in bitcoin , and in 2024 I started recommending 5% to 25% in bitcoin. Of course, people are responsible for their own choices, and they are free to allocate however, they like, and it is their choice whether to follow any suggestion from some lame rando on the interwebs, because in the end, I am not taking any responsibility for their choices to invest in bitcoin or not to invest in bitcoin or whether to trade or gamble with their bitcoin, that is on each of us to figure out what we are going to do and how we are going to spend our time, energies and value.
[edited out]
Holding or trading just like we do is working to make money and it has never been considered easy. Our lives are already difficult and will become even more difficult when we engage in risky ways of making money.
But even though holding bitcoin will be more difficult than daily manual work, but if we are ready to face it and we can overcome it all. We will also receive more worthy rewards. Therefore, I think we should stop complaining once we accept to participate in the game, and if you are afraid that you cannot do it and it is too difficult for you, then it is best for you to leave the market.
I still suggest that it could take 15 to 20 years for any newbie bitcoin investor to get to the point in which he is able to live off of his bitcoin without having to do outside work. Of course, if someone comes to bitcoin after already invested in other areas, then it could be possible to cut the timeline down, including if he is close to fuck you status with whatever funds that he is reallocating into bitcoin.
If you think about it, even if a person invests 10% of his income into bitcoin, it is going to take 10 years just to have 1 year of income invested into bitcoin, and so then if his income is able to grow to entry-level fuck you status (which tends to be 20 to 30 years of income), then the ONLY ways to grow faster is that the investment must grow a lot or maybe the amount invested would have to be greater than 10%, and guys can figure out these kinds of allocation matters and also how aggressive that they are able to be in terms of investing into bitcoin and getting their bitcoin portfolio to a sufficiently large enough size in order to start to either live off of it or to have their bitcoin supplement their current income. See
my post on sustainable withdrawal and perhaps other parts of that thread for the discussion of such sustainable withdrawal ideas.