I'm not saying that there is no singe risk involved in Bitcoin but the truth remains that Bitcoin is not turning to zero for any reason so there is no way I will lose.
It is not a zero chance that bitcoin would either go to zero or some other variation of going down from here rather than going up, so if bitcoin were to continue to spiral downwardly without ever recovering and if you were to keep buying bitcoin and it never recovers, then surely in those kinds of circumstances you would end up losing, and even if they might be low probable outcomes, those are not zero possibility outcomes.
I am particularly perturbed when I hear about Bitcoin going to zero because even though it is a possibility, the chances are slim and I don't want to dwell in that thought as it will only increase anxiety for those holding for as long as they live like me ( I already made up my mind that Bitcoin will be one of the treasure I will to hand over to my heirs). If I'm preoccupied with the thought of Bitcoin going to zero, then I will naturally be drawn to investment options that I know will not go to zero such as physical asset which only natural disaster can reduce it to zero if the investment is genuine. So Bitcoin going to zero is not a factor for me.
I do understand that people like to think in absolutes, yet I am not sure if it is healthy.. .because to me, it seems possible to hold both values in your head at the same time, and so you would not give more than .001% preparations for the going to zero scenario.. or whatever might be the odds.. and yet my stick has frequently been to help to prepare members for a variety of scenarios, while surely at the same time being a pretty BIG pusher of the idea to make sure that you have enough bitcoin and that you are prepared for UP.
I remember going through the whole 8 months of 2015 in which a quite a few guys got dissuaded by their staying in bitcoin, and so there can be questions regarding how many more BTC to acquire, even if the price is so great in the mid-to-lower $200s for nearly the whole year, and sometimes there can be questions about buying more and/or whether more should be bought if it even goes lower or if there was already enough in the holdings.
Each of us have differing ways of dealing with those kinds of scenarios and surely new people may well have times in which their BTC holdings are in the negative for extended periods of time, and so there can be questions about whether to buy more and how much more to buy and whether to keep buying if the price keeps going lower, or to just hold through it... with a kind of hope that the price will recover back above your costs per BTC.
The other factor or variation is investment going down instead of up, well this will simply mean a reduction in dollar value and not on the Bitcoin itself because 1BTC will always remain that, only the dollar equivalent can change and as someone who have the confidence that after this reduction, it will eventually rise so holding it will eliminate whatever risk that may be associated with this variation.
Sure we might keep buying, but if the price goes down and continues to go down, then maybe we run out of money, and maybe we just are able to DCA into bitcoin at that point, and we hope at some point it will recover, but there still can be points in which we might not want to keep putting more money into it... or maybe wait for a further dip before we put more into it... since surely if we have a stash of BTC and maybe they are in the negative, and then the price drops and we buy more and we keep doing that, at a certain point, we might need a certain additional amount of drop in order to feel justified in buying more.. and there could be some point that we give up in buying, and I am not saying selling.. because it is a bad practice to sell on the way down.. so we should be buying on the way down and selling on the way up.. and so even the amount that we sell on the way up might not be a lot, so there would be a fairly large bias towards accumulating and holding rather than selling, but we still should have some kinds of practices in place to prepare for possible extremes.. and yeah, so far the UPs have way outweighed the downs.. so it all ends up balancing out, yet it still could take a few years to get out of the negative and back into the positive, and that is not even a given, even though surely, in bitcoin the asymmetric bet to the upside still rules the day.
From the available data about Bitcoin, the only time you lose money in Bitcoin is when you deliberately sell at a loss else holding it for a little longer will always lead to profits.
Selling too much too soon.. yeah.. and then also trading and/or using margin.... but yeah, so far, historically, those who have either held or just continued to buy on a regular basis and errored on the side of holding and not selling, they have so far always gotten into profits, and truly that is completely true for everyone when when we are at all time prices... and the last time that we were at all time prices was around 7 weeks ago... yet for sure, right now, as I type this post at $59,244, we are right around 20% below ATH prices... so there would be a small grouping of folks who are not currently in profits.
Those who bought around the ATH price of 2021 and held till this new market cycle eventually entered profit even though those might be the core believers of Bitcoin with clear long term view and approach to Bitcoin. Those who bought at the recent ATH price that are in loss now will definitely be in profit, just that we don't know when that will happen and if they will be able to hold like I wish they should be able to. You will agree with me that those using the DCA method might just have a small portion of their Bitcoin collected at that price which may not be so significant to put them in loss overall, meaning they only have part of their Bitcoin collection in loss but their entire portfolio in good profit.
Personally, I tend to believe that the bullish case for bitcoin (and the strength of bitcoin's investment thesis) is so strong that a person should not be overly concerned about whether his BTC holdings are in profits or not for the first 4 years or more, and so there could be some folks who were fucking around with trading or making other mistakes with leveraging and/or lump sum buying at or near the top without additional plans to continue to buy using DCA and/or buying on the dips... so yeah, there could be folks who screwed up their ways of accumulating BTC, and there are people who figure out ways to lose money in bitcoin, even though bitcoin has been mostly UPward in terms of longer trend lines.
So yeah straight forward buying and even consistent buying lump sum buying and supplementing with DCA and/or buying on dips seem to be great practices, even if the price keeps going down, and so I truly agree with following those practices, and perhaps finding that it could still take 4-10 years just to start to get one's bitcoin holdings up to a level in which some kind of a modified approach might start to seem justifiable... so for sure, I don't disagree with your overall idea to just keep buying BTC no matter what the price including dips, while at the same time realizing that it is possible that the price might never recover, even though we have no current evidence why such a thing should happen and even though now we have a lot of evidence that bitcoin is one of the best if not the best investment ever available all across the planet... so people would be dumb not to have an allocation or even to be somewhat aggressive in their allocation to bitcoin, but they still need to understand and appreciate that there are no guarantees in life.. no guarantees that the BTC price will continue to go up.
NO guarantees that bitcoin will not spiral downward for the next 5-10 years.. no guarantees that it will not go to zero.. and a lot of other variations in the ways that there are no guarantees in regards to bitcoin, its prices, its adoption, its network effects and other things that make bitcoin continue to seem amongst the best of current asymmetric bets that anyone could make.. and peeps need to get off zero and at least allocate somewhere in the 5% to 25% arena.. but yep.. no guarantees that they are going to be better off for doing those things..
By the way, your example of those who bought in 2021, there are likely some examples of those who bought at higher prices and then sat on their hands and did not buy more during the 2022 and 2023 dip, so they would be in a worse situation than if they had continued to buy from time to time throughout 2022 and 2023, and sure there might not be very many of those, so I would hate to focus on them as representative, and I also tend to be quite critical of folks who engage in lump sum investment practices who do not follow up with either DCA and/or buying on dips. but yeah, if they largely just bought and held through the whole dip period they would likely be at or close to profits now, yet earlier I was referring to a variety of folks who also might have only just gotten into bitcoin in the last couple of months, and some of them might currently not be in profits, even though surely, I would still consider that ongoing buying should be the solution to their entry point not working out as well for them in terms of not going directly to being in profits.
I would hit wait until someone tell me to buy before I buy more.
When it comes to bitcoin and anyone who might not have enough bitcoin, waiting is not a good strategy.
Waiting does not prepare you for up, and if you are preparing for down or sideways, you may well have to realize that down and/or sideways might not end up happening.
Sure if you have enough or more than enough BTC or you recently bought some and/or you are running out of cash, then maybe waiting might work as a temporary strategy.