Oh maybe I cannot recall your backstory... have you been investing in bitcoin before you came to the forum, or did you just start to get involved in bitcoin in 2020? Maybe you are Michael Saylor.. ? Oh shit... Hi Michael.. did not mean to say mean things about you...
You cannot recall because I haven't told you. I started making small
BTC purchases around July 2017.
I had already been investing in funds and stocks for a few years. At that time I took it as a high risk high potential rewards investment. Like investing in a start-up company. Back in February 2018 if I remember correctly, after the dip, I stopped buying. I didn't know much about the fundamentals or anything. It was a kind of gamble.
From then on I forgot about Bitcoin, while we were in bear market I didn't pay attention, but kept holding.
Last year, with the last halving I started to think that we would surely break $20K again and go higher. I registered on the forum and started learning more about Bitcoin
that's pretty interesting, and of course, there are variations of your story where some persons actually hear about BTC and take some small actions, do they have some familiarity with bitcoin, but then there needs to be some passage of time or maybe even their own more receptiveness to bitcoin to cause them to come back and to look at bitcoin more thoroughly and try to understand it better.
Surely, you do not have to provide any numbers, but I am gathering that your quantity of investment into BTC in 2017 and 2018 was a pretty small number relatively speaking.. but in the end, it is probably all o.k as long as you still hold onto whatever you bought at that time, even if it is not a big amount.
Anyway, I started buying Bitcoin regularly again, but still allocated money to other investments, mainly an S&P 500 fund and some shares.
But I have recently decided to go all in with Bitcoin. All the money I can save in a month I put into buying Bitcoin. I don't invest in anything else anymore.
Back before 2014, I was still contributing to a 401k, so there is a decent amount of incentive to invest into something like a 401k when you have matching funds and tax deferral status.. but sure, maybe up until the amount of the matching funds would be enough to put into that kind of an investment.. I never did actually have that kind of dilemma in front of me, and you did not say anything about a 401k or matching funds, even though that sometimes can be a reasonable consideration that people make to get those kinds of benefits.... hoping that it is going to pay off in the end.
One advantage of investing into bitcoin and NOT using retirement funds is that you can cash out at any time, but surely with bitcoin, if you just continue to buy, there is no tax consequences until you cash out.. so there could be some advantage of just not cashing out until you are damned ready.. which also could be quite a bit earlier than your retirement funds would even be coming available to you in the event that you have any of that.
Nor have I gone crazy and sold my other assets or borrow against my equity as Saylor recommends to invest in Bitcoin.
Putting all your eggs in one basket can be a bit too much for many people, so even if Saylor ends up being correct, it is a quite bold way to go forward.
Remember Saylor did not go balls to the wall right from the start, he first invested something like 70% or more of his company's cash reserves - and sure that is a kind of balls to the walls, already, and then he went into a variety of debt instruments to increase his level of balls to the wall, and many of us do not either have that level of credit, that ability to build that level of credit nor that level of cashflow to be able to service the payments of utilizing the credit (which is another way of saying servicing the debt).
There are not too many of us who are really considering what Saylor did to be a bad move, overall, and really with a 4-6.5 year timeline to service the debt, seems that he does have a pretty damned decent time cushion with full bitcoin cycles usually playing out in 4 years, and there is nothing really to indicate that we are extremely off of that 4 year cycle, yet.
I think with this step of investing all available liquidity in Bitcoin for the next few years and the appreciation, in the next few years BTC is going to be a very important part of my net worth.
Hopefully, you have all your cashflows covered, so we can look at what Saylor did, and sometimes we have to appreciate that he very well has his cashflows covered, and whether we are individuals or attempting to manage our personal cashflows and perhaps the cashflows of a business, we are frequently going to be better off if we can attempt to project our cashflows into the future so we do not get ourselves into any kind of pickle, so let's say hypothetically you have a cashflow of $5k per month, but by the time that you pay all your various bills and whatever, you ONLY have $1,200 left per month for investing. In the past, you used to put $600 per month into bitcoin and $600 per month into stocks and other investments, and then you had a period of only putting that $1,200 into other investments, and now after going through some transition back into BTC and then increasing your percentage into BTC, now you are back to putting all of that $1,200 into bitcoin.
So, sure after a while the amount that you invest into bitcoin could end up matching or exceeding those other investments, and then if we look at the performance of each of the investments, that also will end up causing potential changes in the values of each of the asset classes... and for sure bitcoin could start to become disproportionately larger in size than the other assets.
I remember you saying recently in a post that years ago, I think in the beginning, Bitcoin was 10% of your liquid assets. I guess now it is much more
After about my first year investing into bitcoin (which would have been by the end of 2014), I had figured out that my target was to get my bitcoin allocation to 10% of my quasi-liquid investment assets, so I added everything up and something that I owned were pretty highly liquid, but some things, I discounted if they were not very liquid, so I had a business that I only counted about 1/3 or perhaps a bit more of its value as potentially liquid, and then some of the funds that I owned were more liquid than others, and I could not even consider my 401k as completely liquid without either a 10% withdrawal penalty or going through some expenses to put into a self-directed fund, but even then there are age/disability requirements before the funds become available. Anyhow, my goal became to cause my BTC investment amount to be equal to 10% of the value of all of what I considered to be the value of my quasi-liquid investment portfolio, and pretty much, ever since I figured that out to be my goal, I would almost inevitably tell people that from a beginners point of view and not knowing shit about bitcoin, they should have a starting point of a 1% to 10% allocation into bitcoin, and of course, if they were more confident higher and less confident lower, and of course, if they learned more about the asset, then they could also go above or below my own ongoingly consistent recommendation that everyone should have a 1% to 10% investment into bitcoin. .. hardly anyone listens.... .but does not stop me from continuing to say it if anyone asks.. should I buy bitcoin?.. yes.. 1% to 10 % allocation.. and study it and figure out details from there and adjust afterwards, if needed.
Should I buy Cardano..? no fuck that shit
should i buy Doge coin? no fuck that shit
should I buy Ethereum? no fuck that shit.
should I buy blah blah blah fill in the blank shit coin de juer, defi baloney, nft blah blah nonsense?... no fuck that shit..
Remember I talked with you about bitcoin a few years ago (or last year or last month blah blah blah),and I am wondering if your investment thesis about bitcoin has changed based on recent BTC price performance or the markets or the shitcoins or the macro landscape or whatever might be happening.. I hardly even need to look at any BTC chart... or news or anything and I say, that my recommendation is the same and has been the same no matter what the BTC price... buy bitcoin 1% to 10 % of your portfolio allocation and study it and figure out if you need to adjust... again.. .hardly anyone listens, even if they might ask specifically about buying bitcoin and my immediate and unequivocal answer is yes. Why are they asking? Just trying to see if I am o.k... maybe the price dropped 56% in the past month or two or it is down 85% from its top? or maybe they forgot that even if it is down, it is also up, so maybe when I say that bitcoin is currently up 3.8x from its early September price of $10k and that is pretty damned good.. there eyes just kind of glaze over.. yeah yeah.. and perhaps they are thinking about something and maybe it will come up, but surely I am biased because I am focusing on the UP rather than the down, and I say bitcoin is still going up.. you just need at least a 4-year investment horizon... more glazed eyes and no confirmation of intended action..
Sorry I am repeating myself, and it just emphasizes the point that Saylor is and has been way above and beyond the 1% to 10% allocation and likely because of his use of leverage, we could say that he is 150% invested or something higher than his investment portfolio.. but that might not make any sense either because he does have other investments, assets, etc, but surely if Saylor has studied bitcoin beyond superficialities, then he can weight the upside and downside risks and all of his personal circumstances including his cashflow and his other investments, his timeline, his risk tolerance, his view of bitcoin as compared with other investments, his time, skills and abilities to learn, strategize, plan reallocate from time to time or use investment instruments.
So for me, I reached my 10% at the end of 2014 (and the BTC price was something like $350), and I thought that I was good, but the bitcoin price went down some more (down to lower $200s with a few spikes below) stayed down through out most of 2015 and really had a lot of sub $250 prices through that whole year and probably even tending towards the lower ends of the $200s for the whole year, so by the end of 2015, my BTC allocation did end up going up to about 13.5% in terms of the amount that I invested into BTC, but then the BTC price appreciation brought my BTC close to parity with all my other investments (so 50%) in mid-2017 and the allocation might have gotten close to 90% in the late 2017 price peak.. but I had already decided by late 2016 that I was not going to be selling a lot of my BTC, so I had a system to sell some as the BTC price went up, but not very much at all, and I largely decided to let my BTC investment ride, so during the downward BTC price spikes in December 2018 and in March 2020, my allocation did end up in the ball park of around 45% to 50% again, but then it got back into the 90%, and maybe now it is a bit below 90%.. maybe 85% or so.. something like that and I just kept with the let your winners ride theory.. because I have my other investments too that had gone up something like 60% or maybe even more during the 2014 to present period, but the bitcoin investment went up like 44x or maybe we can just use $1k as our average cost per BTC, and say that it went up 38x, but it was up as high as 65x.. and recently down to nearly 29x in profits.. still better than 60% or so, even if giving bitcoin a higher cost per BTC because sometimes mistakes are made along the way that increase your costs per BTC.. sometimes? sometimes?
From that first time when I bought Bitcoin, 2017, I remember that McAfee was the one who was in the media the most,grabbing headlines by claiming that he was going to eat his dick and all that. Today we have Saylor, which I think gives a much better image than McAfee and has contributed more positively to the popularization of Bitcoin.
Saylor is a way better role model.. smarter for sure.. and gosh McAfee was one thing and then another and then another and into shitcoins and could not really rely on him to be even quasi-consistent. Saylor has a lot more solid ideas and even seems to be putting money where his mouth is in terms of things that he researches into and even his actual actions to attempt to educate people.. will we have to slay our hero.. I hope not.. .but we do have to be careful in putting too much credence into a person who could end up turning, or get forced into taking a position that might be good for him or his company, but might not be what a decent number of others believe is good for bitcoin, and there is room for all of that variance in bitcoin, because anyone can invest into bitcoin or even advocate for it, whether they are likable or agreeable or not or even if they have good or bad intentions.
