Hey WOers. Real life has taken me away from here for the last >month so unfortunately I haven't been able to read or write much.
However, for the first time in ages I sold a little bit of btc and spent the proceeds on a few new toys - I don't want to disclose exact details. But what I do want to stress is that IT'S OK TO SELL A BIT NOW AND THEN!
friends1980's earlier post caused me to check to see that I've been knocking around here for 8 years now, which is insane (in a good way). But I've hodled (mostly) and have not really enjoyed many benefits of seeing my net worth multiply, especially since I think I had become preoccupied with not wanting to see my stash reduce, in terms of numbers of btc. But this small sale of btc has allowed me to extract some real enjoyment, experiences and value that I wouldn't have had if I had kept on hodling all of my stash.
Sure, I only sold a tiny, tiny bit - but it was enough to treat myself to sufficient material gains and experiences to be deemed justifiable. I now kind of wish I hadn't been so inflexible in the past.
So, if you've made some gains over the last few years, don't feel too bad about cashing out a bit (but only a little bit!) and enjoying it now, in the moment - after all, none of us know how long we're going to be around and there's no point taking your private keys to your grave.
Of course, keep on hodling, but treat yourself a bit too if you're lucky enough to be in a position to do so. We deserve it, after all the shit we've been through!!
Sure, if you have BTC and you are greatly in profits, then it is good to shave some BTC off along the way, and so I have no problem with that.
I do have a bit of a problem to provide some kind of global assertion that this is the time to be selling, after we had a 56% price correction and we happen to be currently bouncing around in about a 40% price correction zone and likely in a bull market.
So, sure each of us might have our own conclusions, and some of us might believe that the bullrun for this cycle is over.. so there might be some erroneous and some good reasons to sell, and some folks might have come to a realization that they have not sold any BTC for 6-8 years or whatever, so those folks would likely come to differing conclusions regarding whether there is any need to time the market in terms of their shaving off some profits here and there.. and so there is likely no real blanket answer regarding what to do exactly.. .
For example guys like me, have been selling small amounts all the way up from $250 to $64,895, so in the last couple of months I have been buying way the fuck more than selling, merely based on BTC's recent price price direction, so of course, if I bought all the way down to $28,600, then my system already allows me to have been selling on the way up.. but my amounts are only meant as kinds of systematic maintenance rather than feeling any kind of emotional or financial need to take some value off the table due to overly deferring gratification... so yeah, if someone (such as yourself, perhaps? strawbs) has failed/refused to take profits all along, then you may well not be in a very good position in terms of suggesting that now is a better time to do it rather than some guys who might not be in the same place as you.
By the way, personally, in about late April, I did enter into some various kinds of contracts that do cause me to have to have more cash available than what I would usually have needed to have, and largely I had been considering to NOT change any aspects of BTC management systems that I already have in place, but the BTC's price performance ended up largely moving against me by the time I made some tweaks to my system in terms of moving funds around - so sure, with me, there has also been some juggling, but I deny cashing out any extra BTC (at least not so far), and so far, I have just been moving funds around.. but NOT really in preferable conditions when we had the BTC price correct by 56% during that time.
At some point, I will probably provide some additional details regarding what I did (or what I am in the midst of doing), but surely I do not want to say too much while the process is still playing out...
Yup, just to clarify I also agree that it's not a good time to sell, since I firmly believe that we're still in a bull market and that this bull could well have a significant way to run, way beyond the $60k-ish we saw back in April. I expect (hope?) for $200k by the end of this year, but that is based on nothing noteworthy (and certainly no sorcery on my part!). But a serendipitous opportunity arose (unrelated to btc) which I couldn't resist and which comes along very rarely, and which needed fiat. So it's likely I would have sold some btc no matter what the price. But as you say, I admit that I have an advantage of having made early gains, whereas if I'd only recently become a bitcoiner then I surely would have acted differently. "Horses for courses" as they say in these parts.
For sure, sometimes I do NOT want to get into too many personal details regarding whether I might now ONLY be playing with house money or if there might be some kind of average cost per BTC that might be worth proclaiming.
In recent times, I have been gravitating towards using an average cost of $1k per BTC - as a kind of short-hand easy way to approximate cost per BTC and also profits.. but for artistic or even argumentative purposes, I may even want to tweak my theoretical average cost per bitcoin up or down in order to merely attempt to make some kinds of points that fairly could be reflective a lot of versions of me (or people who may have entered into bitcoin at similar times as me and likely gotten similar - or variations of the performance that I have actually achieved personally - and again, my personal specifics might not really be that relevant regarding if my average cost per BTC happens to be $500, $750, $1k, $1,500 or some variation of any of those.. but surely, I don't really mind using $1k as a kind of way of making general ballpark points that are still pretty damned accurate in the whole scheme of things.
Also, even though I attempt to present myself somewhat consistently, over the years, any observer (even including my lil selfie) should be able to appreciate that I have had some changes in my perspectives in terms of how I present factors that should be considered based on factors that I am trying to consider... so probably there can be some value in having had gone through some experiences, attempted to articulate various perspectives in this forum (this thread) and in other places and attempted to learn by going through those considerations and reconsiderations.
So, yeah, none of us should be attempting to get too far ahead of ourselves ion terms of trying to figure out if there might be some kind of individual tweak that we might need to make... to what we are actually doing or what we are planning to do and what we consider to be important relevant factors for our own way of contemplating the matter - and I still have to say that if I use $1k as a kind of ballpark consideration for my average cost per BTC, I also feel that there is something also that remains stuck in my consideration framework in regards to $5k BTC prices... that's a 5x return, and should I not resist getting stymied into doing whatever the fuck with my bitcoin so long as I have at least profits, and for sure 5x or more in profits should cause me hardly any inhibition in terms if I feel some kind of desire to cash out some value here and there in order to get something that I want... I should not have any guilt, right? Again, that would be 5x or higher for profits.
One of my own potentially problematic areas is that I have decided to allow for a kind of moving goal post to not get stuck on a $5k price because with the passage of time, that $5k just starts to look unreasonably too low - especially in the past 7 months or so. So, since I started to consider that it would be unrealistic for me to be getting caught up too much upon a stagnant price, I started to consider the 208-week moving average as my new floating amount of BTC price that I should not feel any kinds of hesitation at all if I am selling BTC so long as the BTC price is at least above the 208-week moving average. Accordingly, in about March 2020, the 208-week moving average was around $5k, but in current times, the 208-week moving average is just below $14k... So, I am not sure if I am being practical or not, and if push comes to shove, and BTC prices were to crash below the 208-week moving average, but it still was above $5k, might I still rationalize my way into selling some BTC if for some reason I had some perceptions of real world needs? I am thinking that I would, and in that regard, I would not be really selling BTC based on any kind of panic or anything like that, but instead, I would be selling based on some kind of real world need that I might have (whether that is an emergency situation in which I have lost access to all other cashflow sources or some other kind of less than preferable situation).
So what I am suggesting is that even though in seemingly non emergency situations, I can probably use the 208-week moving average as a guide for making sure that I am NOT selling below that point, but at the same time, I should not feel guilty if I sell some BTC so long as the BTC price is above that 208-week moving average price.
So I have been creating these kinds of frameworks for myself and my perception of my own circumstances (and of course, attempting to share such frameworks in my discussions of BTC strategies), while at the same time attempting to modify my perspectives in regards to the frameworks that I end up considering imposing on myself (while at the same time appreciating that I have full discretion over myself and over whatever I do, including if I were to choose to override my own frameworks).
So currently, I am thinking that the 208-week is my perception of a
BTC price bottom in a bear market (which again is currently just below $14k), and my current perception of a
BTC price bottom in a bull market is to use the 104-week moving average, which is currently just below $21k... and surely, currently, I consider that we are most likely in a bull market and not in a bear market.
I wish I could share more details and even photos of my reasons for selling a little bit of corn, but you never know who's lurking here.
For sure any of us can get excited about various material things (goods or services), and sure there might be some objective value in terms of your consumption preferences, but in the end, I doubt that any of the objective considerations matter as much as how you might determine the value... so for sure, no need to justify regarding your level of cccccciittttttteeeee, if any, that you are either getting or expecting to get from your BTC transaction (you sell out!!!!!!
).. hahahahahaha
So while it does hurt a little to see the price having increased a few percentage points since I sold some, I have a new uplifting toy to play with which I see as a present to myself as reward for hodling through those viscous and depressing bear markets of the past.
For sure, some of us might establish a kind of sell window.. so let's say that I want to get $5k in the next two weeks, then I might sell $2.5k right away, and attempt to be strategic about selling the other $2.5k maybe in two or three batches. There certainly remains quite a bit of discretion, and it must feel a whole hell of a lot better to shave some BTC off if the BTC is going up rather than if it is going down.. but sure, in any event, there still can be some difficulties in determining if you should just sell all right away or try to be strategic about the matter, because sometimes trying to be strategic could end up backfiring too, if the BTC price trend of UPpity all of a sudden reverses... so who knows? who knows? especially regarding the short-term.
In other words, it's nice to use a bit of our gains to have some fun now and then
You have been in bitcoin about a half of a year or so longer than me, and I did not really tell anyone (in my real life) about my buying into bitcoin for the first 8-9 months or so, as I was buying and as the price had dropped from $1,163 to sub $400s, so my BTC average price was probably nearly about $600 when I started to tell people about bitcoin in late 2014, and the BTC price was sub $400 (about $385 as I recall specifically).
Anyhow, so many people either ignored me completely or outright poo poo-ed my sharing of such "insight", and just consider that some of those people might have spent their next year investing in stocks, or gold or houses or whatever, and if they had just taken a few thousand dollars (let's say $5k) and put it into bitcoin in either late 2014 or almost any time in 2015 (let's say that they ended up with an average cost of $400 per coin, which would have gotten them about 12.5 BTC ($5k/$400)
(which, by the way, would NOT be very unrealistic at all since for the vast majority of 2015, the BTC price was in the mid $200s), in these days, they would have been able to UP their level of consumption like drunken sailors and sure if they had spent (or assessed the value of) their 12.5 BTC at the $64,895 top, they would have had $811k, but still who cares? They still would have been balling, even if they only were to spend (or assess) their BTC value at $35k - which still would have been $437.5k... .. so yeah, shave a bit off, who cares, there is a lot of profits in there from a hypothetical $5k investment in 2014/2015 (and of course, strawbs, your timeline is earlier than mine or the Bitcoin knowledge that I had attempted to share with several of my friends/relative in late 2014).
