You've hit the nail on the head when you say that one of the most crucial elements in investing in Bitcoin is time. Your chances of getting a good return on your investment increase with the length of time you can hang onto your Bitcoin. Similar to a snowball effect, your investment will increase over time. Additionally, as you mentioned, you'll gain more knowledge on how to maximize your investment over time. The misconception that most people have when investing in Bitcoin is that it's a get-rich-quick scheme, but that's clearly not the case and that if they just start investing in Bitcoin, they'd be rich in a month or two, and this infact is the actual reason why most Bitcoin investors go into the short-term trade and they end up loosing money and giving Bitcoin a bad name, they go all in without really having the knowledge of what they are doing and then at the end incur losses for themselves. Bitcoin is more of a long-term game, and if you really wanna rip the true benefit of Bitcoin, then going long-term will definitely help you achieve that.
Bitcoin investment is combination of knowledge and patience. You need to have knowledge about how to invest in Bitcoin to get good return. We have discussed many investment strategies here i.e. DCA, LUMP SUM and buying on dips. Which every strategy you adopt (or you go with all three) the key to success is patience or HODL for long term without it you wont see good results.
So yeah.. 4-10 years or longer would be a good way to think about any bitcoin that you buy to have at least that kind of timeline, so if you are DCAing into bitcoin for 6 years straight, then your earliest BTC buys would have had reached investment timelines of 4-10 years or longer,
You already have a post where 6 different Hypo's are discussed that gives good idea of where you are if you are accumulating bitcoin for last 10 or 5 years.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63394117It is hard to rest on my laurels, and yeah sometimes I feel that I should put some of the ideas or structure of my prior posts into my investment ideas thread, so that I don't need to repeat work that I had already done.
For example, I am kind of proud of a post that I just did in regards to the compounding effects of bitcoin over the past 8-9 years. Here's the relevant part.
.........So, let's look at the historical numbers and the timeline from 2015 to present again.
1) 0) $250 (2015) 1X
2) 1) $500 (2015-2016) 2X
3) 2) $1,000 (2016-2017) 2X * 2 = 4X
4) 3) $2,000 (2017) 4X * 2 = 8X
5) 4) $4,000 (2017-2020) 8X * 2 = 16X
6) 5) $8,000 (2017-2020) 16X * 2 = 32X
7) 6) $16,000 (2017-2022) 32X * 2 = 64X
8 ) 7) $32,000 (2021-2023?) 64X * 2 = 128X
9) 8 ) $64,000 (2021-?) 128X * 2 = 256X
10) 9) $128,000 (?) 256X * 2 = 512X
You can likely see that if you are shaving off profits at the earlier stages, then you are going to eat into the compounding (and/or exponential) component in regards to how your value would have had grown through that period of time.
So in this particular factual example the guys who bought in 2015 and had a base of $250 per BTC and who did not sell any of their BTC, they would have had experienced 8 doublings that would have brought their holdings up to 256x for a short period of time during the period that BTC was priced at more than $64k, and so then their amount of value would have come back down to 6 doublings when the BTC price dropped back down to around $16k (which would have been around 64x) and then now they are currently in the supra 7 doublings that would have been 128x when the BTC prices were at $32k, and they will be back to 256x once (or if) the BTC price gets back to supra $64k, and then if the BTC price goes above $128k, then they will get into the supra 512x territory..
So each doubling now has much much greater magnifying effects as compared to the kind of smaller magnifying effects that would have had been felt in the first few of doublings.. so the power of the doublings tend to come later down the line, so long as the asset continues to go up in value and to have a kind of persistent effect.. .. something like a Lindy effect that suggest that the longer that something non-perishable (like an idea or a technology) is in existence and maintaining itself the more likely it is going to continue to be in existence.
Of course, the bitcoin maximalist argument would assert that the Lindy effect applies to bitcoin more than it does to various shitcoins, but the theoretical idea of the Lindy effect is not completely absent from various shitcoins, even if some of the ideas and/or innovations of shitcoins (if they come up with any that involve anything worthwhile besides scamming people) may well have decently good chances to get absorbed into bitcoin.
Holding really matters in investing in Bitcoin but it doesn't mean we have to do this our whole life. If we take a look at the price chart, prices are growing but can we think this will be the same trend in the next few years? Not for sure and it was uncertain. So I could say that holding will not be forever as it also depends on the market situation. Selling our Bitcoin during the bull season is a perfect option IMHO and get on the train back again once the market correction starts. But yes, this needs strong hands because waiting for 4 years is not as easy as people think as we need to deal our emotions as well.
Investors that have the experience and that had been holding for a long time could attest that it pays to hold but that might not be easy for everyone that is a Bitcoin investor. It takes courage for us to keep seeing our holding losing value continuously without knowing whether to sell to keep the remaining lost or to keep holding.
So far in bitcoin's history it has been a good practice for BTC accumulators to just continue to buy and to reassess from time to time in terms of how aggressive that they are able to continue to buy, and maybe after 4 years or so (a full cycle) of buying, you might start to get some ideas about whether (and if so how) to adjust the previously employed BTC accumulation strategies. Of course, there are no guarantees, so it is probably best to figure out some kind of a buying pattern that is comfortable, and even though history does not guarantee future results, there are not real and/or meaningful signs that bitcoin's investment thesis if getting any weaker (rather than stronger) over the coming years.
Although not all holdings are profitable so we need to know what we are doing so that we don't invest our funds in a bad project that will not make us to finally lose our funds.
Yeah.. fuck shitcoins.. stick with bitcoin... don't be fucking around with imitations or diversification or some other bullshit distracting and lame investing/gambling/trading ideas that lure you into failing/refusing to sufficiently/adequately stack bitcoins in as aggressive as a way that you can without over doing it.
This is why Bitcoin is the only project in the crypto market that can give us what will want although the risk is also there for us to choose whether to be a long term holders or short term holders.
If you don't know about whether to be a short term or a long term holder of bitcoin, then you likely need to learn about bitcoin, but if you don't know very much about bitcoin and you are concerned about your bitcoin investment, then probably you should tamper down your investment in order that you don't panic... and so it is better to buy and hold a long time rather than overdoing it and then having to sell your BTC at a time that is anything other than your own choosing.
[edited out]
Those that purchased Bitcoin at the beginning did, in fact, receive a very disproportionate return on their investment. Regarding opportunity cost, I totally agree. Even if someone bought Bitcoin with money that they could have invested in something else, the return on their Bitcoin investment would likely be much higher than the return they would have gotten on that other investment. Of course, all of this is hypothetical.
When we are looking at past performance of various portfolios it is not hypothetical to compare them, even though we could take hypothetical examples, or we could even compare our own performance to a hypothetical example, such as someone who might have DCA'd into BTC versus if he had invested in some other various kinds of investment opportunities that he might have had at various points in time.
Surely, we cannot go back in time and change what we did, but we can choose the extent to which we might want to be aggressive in our bitcoin investment now or the extent to which we might want to employ a more aggressive bitcoin investment strategy - and we still might end up making mistakes because we cannot necessarily know the extent to which any strategy that we start to employ now might pay off - yet if we are ongoingly assessing our own situation and we are attempting to employ good practices, we likely would end up improving the chances that our investments would pay off over the passage of time, especially if we make sure to include (and maybe even prioritize) bitcoin accumulation into what we are doing...and maybe even more important for those who either don't have any bitcoin or do not have very many bitcoin.
It is impossible to predict with certainty what would have happened if someone had chosen to invest in something other than Bitcoin.
When it comes to history, if you know their budget then you can plot out what would have happened in terms of if you are describing some kind of a buying strategy, but if you are going from right now, you don't necessarily know what is going to happen, but you can still create a buying approach that increases your likelihood for success, especially if you are able to establish some kind of an investment timeline that is 4-10 years or longer.
If you investment timeline is shorter than 4 years, then maybe you should not be investing in bitcoin, but hey people can do what they like.
However, considering Bitcoin's potential return on investment in contrast to other viable options, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, or other assets, is still an intriguing thought. It's possible that Bitcoin has occasionally performed significantly better than those other investments. For instance, during the last ten years, the S&P 500 has returned roughly 7% annually on average, but during the same period, Bitcoin has gained over 200% annually on average.
Sure, something like that. When I look at my own investment portfolio prior to bitcoin and see my bitcoin performance in the past 10 years, my traditional portfolio came close to doubling, and my bitcoin holdings had gone up around 52x, and yeah there is going to be variation in terms of how much anyone might be able to put into any asset, and I did a bit of a run down of
my own allocations between late 2013 and mid-2022.. I have not updated it in the last 18 months... but maybe I will in the future... and the bitcoin portion smoked everything else.
Naturally, past performance does not guarantee future success, and as Bitcoin is far more erratic than the stock market, its returns can vary greatly from year to year. But there is certainly a chance for an enormous return on investment.
Bitcoin likely remains amongst the best, if not the best current investment, and guys can choose their own path, including their own allocation choices. And, yeah, it is not guaranteed, but it remains very sound money, if any of us might not have had noticed.
The power of compounding rewards is another intriguing point to consider. Compounding allows the return on your investment to gradually increase over time. For example, if you invest $1,000 and get a 10% return, you'll have $1,100 at the end of the year. But if you reinvest that $1,100 and get another 10% return, you'll have $1,210 at the end of the second year. And so it goes on and on. Therefore, the compounding effects of Bitcoin's returns may have led to a significantly higher gain over time than someone might have predicted, even if they had only invested a little amount of money. For instance, if a person had invested just $100 in 2010 and HODLED their BITCOIN, they would have accumulated over $300,000 by the end of 2021. Even if that's a very specific and uncommon situation, it's still intriguing to think about how Bitcoin investors' performance might have been influenced by compounding gains.
Yep.. compounding is very powerful especially if we might well be considering doublings in value, as I posted on it earlier today.. and referred to it above in my response to MusaPk.