Topic: HODL is purely a mental challenge - page 3. (Read 1409 times)

I guess this is something most of don't get, invest what you know you can afford while still being able to live your life the way you live. Bitcoin investment is not ponzi schemes that would crash, so you don't need to panic buy or sell but no body should still be having this mentality,
It's been a year since the FTX crash the term bitcoin is doom is over but bitcoin is still bitcoin with this and the previous challenges bitcoin will rise above all and soon people will see no need for CEX because bitcoin has overcome all the challenges CEX to the crypto world and so opt for DEX and non custodian wallet and it will be bitcoin or bitcoin investment.
Sometimes the biggest issues is during the bull run, though your plan was to HODL for 2 years and suddenly like 6 months time, the process surge some might be tempted to sale even before it reach their expected ROI.

I am going to say right off the top that there are some problems with both how the OP is framed and also with some of the responses within the thread.

Surely many of know and appreciate that there are needs for real world actions, and we cannot just use our minds to accomplish tasks or even to put ourselves into a position in which we are able to continue with a plan that we might have had wanted to carry out or maybe to have had started to carry out.

So, in that regard, I have a lot of doubts about whether any bitcoin related plan could be "purely" a mental challenge, even if there likely is a lot of mental component within any plan that we might attempt to carry out and to follow through with, including that sometimes whatever preparations that we might have made, to carry out the plan, may or may have not had been enough in order to put ourselves into a strong enough position as to follow through with what we had originally intended.

I would not even say that there would necessarily be any kind of absolute need to stick with a plan if the plan is not working, so sometimes there can be legitimate, rational and prudent reasons to actually abandon a plan that had already been started.

Part of any question might be to figure out what our plan is and then to attempt to both follow through with it and to learn along the way, so it could be that we establish a plan to invest into bitcoin for the longer term of 4-10 years or more and to follow a certain strategy to accumulate BTC in a variety of ways that might include lump sum buying, DCA and/or buying on the dip, but then we may also need to reassess our plan from time to time based on our individual financial and psychological factors, but also may have to do with our view of bitcoin.. what did we think about bitcoin when we started to follow our investment plan, and did something about bitcoin change in the process of following our plan that would either contribute to our need to reassess our following of the plan or to tweak the plan or to abandon the plan.

Sometimes bitcoin HODLers will wrongly conclude that either there is something wrong with bitcoin or that there might be some kind of a need to sell BTC when the price is dropping in order to either buy back at a lower price or to just save themselves from losing more than they had initially planned to lose.  Many of these can be mental challenges, but they are also challenges of putting systems in place that might be aggressive, but not so aggressive that it fails to prepare for BTC price moves in either direction, including extreme BTC price moves that go beyond expectations (which we also know happens in BTC from time to time).  

Ultimately we seem to get into a place in which we cannot really have strong assessments regarding how we might act in certain circumstances if we have not gone through a certain level of planning it out, preparing for price moves in either direction, but also engaging in kinds of investing into bitcoin that might border upon aggressiveness but does not go so far as to devolve into gambling, and sometimes if we are not sure about how aggressive that we might be able to be with our bitcoin investment, then it might be better to employ a more whimpy bitcoin approach in order that we don't contribute to our own feelings of stress in the event that the BTC price ends up moving against what we thought that it would do (which largely means going down in price rather than sideways and/or up).


You have some good ideas, but it also sounds to me that you have likely put yourself into a status of being over-invested in bitcoin, and you have a bit of a gambling mentality in which you are planning to cash out some of your BTC at a certain point in time after the halvening, while at the same time you don't plan to sell all of your BTC... so you are surely wanting to try to play the waves that may or may not happen and it may or may not work out for you.. though it sounds like you have a decent amount of patience and attempts to plan through some of the potential waves.

Within reason, I personally don't mind the idea of overly investing into bitcoin, but each of us needs to try to make sure that we have our emergency funds covered and our cashflow, so that we do not get into a financial and/or psychological pickle because we had been overly investing into BTC.

Attention drawn after your profit have been gotten through bull run i don't see the point of still holding the best i can do is to buy during the bear market. To me that makes much sence then having and leaving it to drop there is no sense in that.  The way the whales show so much interest in holding and so dedicated, they have strong faith in bitcoin and I wonder how they did it to accumulate such amount of Bitcoin.

Your strategy is perfect even for does that don't have much,  the deep is the focus point and have a target once it is reached then sell and wait to do the same thing again. Holding is not just as easy as it looks it is so challenging because you will have different thoughts even to sell. You just have to stick to your gun and not sell. And one thing is that the bear market must come so is the bull market so make proper use of the both seasons is called wisdom.

+1
4 years would be the time, I consider it to be HODLing as well and 4 years at least because as we know, the longer we will wait (in theory), the more profits might be the result. 

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Your translation would be nice to have, so your request is much appreciated.
I've officially reserved your translation in my list:

Language	translated by	Title
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No hurry to translate it.
When you are ready, you can announce it here. 

you are right.
Not your key not your CoinYou are really wise to keep your tokens or bitcoins in noncustodial wallets.Noncustodial wallets are held in your own hands while custodial wallets are wallets controlled by an organization.These wallets are more likely to be hacked.
If you want to keep your tokens as safe as possible you should always use a non-custodial wallet like Electrum or hardware wallet. So do not use any centralized exchange or wallet or custodial wallet to hold your bitcoins. Examples of some custodial wallets are Binance, Kucoin, etc. On the other hand, there are non-custodial wallets Exodus, Electrum, Mycelium Etc.

To be a hodler you must have patience and mental endurance.You can't be a real hodler if you don't wait for the four-year cycle.If you want to invest in a coin or bitcoin for a long time, you must bear stress and hold them until their price increases.When a person buys bitcoins during a certain period of time and holds the money until its price is halved, we call him a real holder.It is not so easy to become a real Hodler.

Not the typical use of "not all the eggs in the same basket", but as per your concern on the safety of your coins, we could say "not your sats in the same wallet", which is also a wise practice. Now I wonder if you have your crypto portfolio diversified or you only hodl Bitcoin: as an investor with 2 decades of experience, I'm curious what your strategy is.

About the art of HODLing, what is easy to understand in the theory is often hard to do, because many people want fast gains with little money. If one hasn't much money, instead of trading or investing short term, they should try to get a good job and DCA like you: only if someone invests the money that can afford to lose won't lose the sleep when things go wrong in the market and will hodl long term without suffering.

Many don't want to hear that, but that's the way it is.


While you wait for the OP's answer, thanks for the interest in sharing

It doesn't have to be a mental challenge or even an emotional one to be honest, I think that if you don't make bitcoin the only thing that revolves around your daily life. Now what I mean by that is that when you invest in bitcoin, you don't have to take it seriously by watching the market 24/7, if you're not a long-term investor I can understand why you have to be checking but for the sake of the topic, you are going to be a long-term HODLer which means that you're aiming for the long run growth of bitcoin, you don't need to worry about the dumps that's inevitable to happen in short-term. To be able to survive the HODLing, I think that you just have to learn to think that bitcoin's going to grow no matter what and your only goal in it is to accumulate until you're ready to profit.

If I will be permit I love to take this topic to my local board naija "pidgin language".

Thank you for pointing all these out. I must say that they portray the fear, safety, gains, intents and mistakes HOLDers make while holding their coins and how they should rightly go about it. However, as many might be guilty or careless about some or all, I must say that my own concern is only about the safety of my funds, not the psychology of Hodling them. This is because I've been a trader and investor for almost 2 decades, which is why I see the things of crypto as normal to me.

Nonetheless, this is helped by my plans on how to buy and exit safely without compromising it. My strategy to buy is to either DCA or Buy when a long-term bullish trend is confirmed. I exit only when I see a good reason to do so on the monthly chart, which is why I don't get affected if I make a mistake by that action.

As for safely Hodling it, I've set out 5 different non-custodial wallets that are open sources to distribute my coin for safekeeping. By this, all can't be comprised at once.

I don't like holding through the bull market which is the right time to let go of your Bitcoin, I mean it's just smart to sell your Bitcoin when it's pumping hard and buy back when it's down, I respect the whales that have held for so long and the wallets are not active and I believe this doesn't mean you are dead or lost access to the wallet.

My strategy is buy on the dips and sell everything in the bull market, I will get them back, way cheaper when Bitcoin dumps again, it's true that holding is a pure mental challenge but it shouldn't be if a bull and bear market as happened right in front of you before, there must have been some lessons you learned.

This is why people get rekt in altcoins too, they hold and get too lazy to sell, instead to keep track on price actions, I mean you can do this with crypto trackers, there are few apps that you can use to track price movement online today, always pay attention to price action, once the bull market starts mostly after the halving it's the right time to get focused on price actions.

Well, if you are a lazy person then you can be a good HODLER. Just keep your bitcoins in a place where it is difficult to access.
You will most probably avoid those occasions where the price has pumped and you are getting quick profits but you then you become too lazy to sell.
Thus you end up HODLING and price goes to the next ATH price and that's what happened to me. LOL. 

Holding can be risky if you are thinking about holding something that doesn't have massive support from the industry. Holding assets like gold, silver, bitcoin always seems profitable in the long term. Day trading can be profitable but it requires extensive knowledge about the market and experience. Despite that there isn't a guarantee that all of your trading will be successful.

However day trading requires time and patience, which can be challenging for many of us. A full-time professional trader can be a good profession if your earnings are sufficient to cover your family expenses. Even if you have a great skill and earn enough money to maintain your economic stability, it is advisable to have multiple income sources, as sometimes it can be dangerous to have only one income source.

This will be the solution since for making busy theirselves on their day job they can make them forget some things that can distract them on decision making to hold. Maybe on trading strategy it depends on the skills of traders since daily traders can still possibly earn more than bigger if they are good on trading. Holding is risky option but if this is done in right time and proper mental assessment for sure we can are successful earners since we have bull run seasons and that time can make us earn huge profit if we have long patience to wait.

If they do short term holding then its not a bad thing since the trader could decide for his self if what timeline he could able to sell his coins and as long as he earns then everything is fine on selected settings.

I remember reading that the late Hal Finney envisioned a future in which banks would be backed by Bitcoin. He understood Bitcoin's scaling problems and that the main layer will never have the capacity for an entire economy. But he thought that banks could perform daily settlements in Bitcoin once a day. A decade away and we don't seem any closer to that.

I think it's all about the mental and emotional game, right? They say not to let your feelings run the show, but let's be real, sometimes fear creeps in, especially when you're HODLing that Bitcoin. I've been on that rollercoaster myself, man. I mean, I'll preach 'HODL' all day, but in reality, it's not always easy to stick to it 100%.

Well, that's a really long question, so let me elaborate each detail.  


Of course, a profit is already nice and a pizza for some magic internet money is also already nice but it is also about missed profits. Because by selling early, we are at risk of missing much more profits. Of course, selling early for a profit can also mean, we have a safe profit, in case Bitcoin's price will go down again.
But as a HODler, we are always speculating to have a rising Bitcoin price. Maybe not speculating to have a rising Bitcoin price tomorrow, but a rising Bitcoin price next halving, for example.


But for such a case, we need to have a dropping Bitcoin price again.
And Bitcoin has overally been more often in a bull market.
So, it could happen to us to see Bitcoin rising even more after we have sold - and we would miss big profits.

In addition, even in case of a dropping Bitcoin price, we need to re-invest of course. Some people just go away after making a profit.


Well, people can still sell, only requirement is to have access to it (via private keys).  


Selling mainly depends on everyone's general finances. Some people really need money and are forced to sell, some people don't need money and for such cases, I believe HODL is a very good strategy.  

In addition, you shouldn't forget that nobody is currently able to predict the price of Bitcoin in the coming years. People saying the opposite are lying. Nobody can certify that Bictoin will be above the current price (around 28k$) in 5 years, or even in one year. Especially after the deployment of CBDC, nobody can say how the Bitcoin market will react to that. Bitcoin starts to get old, and it's expensive and slow to use compared to most of other cryptocurrencies, so its adoption is likely to happen as time is passing. Only serious technological changes could reverse the trend IMO.

If you have another profession and cannot dedicate your time to trading then it is advisable for you to consider the DCA strategy to build a portfolio for you to hold. Some experts say holders profits are greater than interday traders profits most of the time. Holders don't take much loss if they have great portfolio management skills and have the patience to hold their assets for enough time.

I also agree, whether to hodl or sell in short term as long as the person is in profit it is still a good trade/investment.  It would be better if one is knowledgeable with trading to exercise trading then holding since trading can greatly increase an investors position if all his actions is a success.  There might be more risk involve but if successful the investor can reap more reward or profit.  Short term holdin isn't also a bad thing as long as he is able to rinse and repeat his action.  Besides profit will never be realized if we don't sell our stash.

There is a famous quote from the Bible that goes For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. We all are buying and hodling bitcoin with the intent to make profit. Hodling is easier when you follow the rule Invest only what you can afford to lose, this eases the pressure mand takes your mind off your bitcoin hodlings when faced with financial difficulties.