I'll provide my "story" as well, as I pulled a Bawb as well and "took a little off the top" today.
Joined this forum 11/26/2013 after buying my first coin a month prior in October. Bought the "top" at $1,000 back then, then continued to buy all the way down haha to $190. Then I stopped, thinking oh man, what did I get myself into. But never did stop believing.
What a wonderful opportunity this has afforded me, as I just took early retirement at age 50 and bought a second small home in Oregon and will be caddying part time starting around the end of this summer at Bandon Dunes.
What a majestic use of this invention, it propelled me to be able to step back and get out of the rat race at least ten years earlier than I would have been able to do without it.
So glad a friend emailed me an article about it at work one day. I remember sending him .15 of a coin as a thank you, at the time, this would have been a $100 gift. I do think he still has this $9k+ gift today.
Love reading all the success stories and am definitely trying to keep my stash as robust as I can, and will continue to sell the dips and buy at the top going forward haha
Wow, that's great to hear. I had 21 BTC at one point, then kept liquidating along the way, partly due to debts, partly due to holidays. Today i have less than 1 BTC but it has been a fun ride. I am debt free with a home already paid for, cant say i did too badly, but there is always that lingering thought of "What if...". Fantastic to see someone who actually harnessed the full potential of bitcoin! More power to you!

I was considering whether it is worth any kind of comment for anyone who has been into BTC nearly as long as me (going by your registration date) to be thinking that it is a good thing to currently have ONLY less than 1 BTC.. or even if we round up to 1 BTC, there seems to be something wrong with such a picture.
1BTC might not be a bad goal for someone who is either just getting into BTC or maybe only been in BTC for a year or two, but for someone who has presumably been in bitcoin for 7 years-ish, we should be concerned about such paltry level of BTC accumulation, no?
I am pretty sure that I told this story before, but I had a girlfriend in 2015-2016 who I introduced to bitcoin, and she started buying BTC around the lower $200s, and she acquired around 17 BTC, so in November 2015, when the BTC price shot up from mid-$200s to $504, she sold all of her BTC for around $350, and she made something like $1,900, so she was quite happy with her decision, and she said that she bought a nice purse with that money. She was getting kind of nervous when the BTC price went up to $500, and I kept telling her to buy back. At one point, she agreed that she would buy back at $300, and she would get back the 17 BTC or something like that.
So she was going to manually enter her BTC buy, and for like an hour the BTC price went down to her $300 buy price, and around that time, I sent her a text and asked her if she had bought back, and she said that she was "on the phone" at the time that the price had dropped, but she would buy back on the next dip... and sure she had quite a bit of patience, but the price did not dip to $300 again, and she ended up buying back some BTC around $415.. Maybe it was around 12 BTC or something like that, but for several months in mid to late 2016, she was reminiscing that she used to have 17 BTC, but that she would never be able to reach that level again, and part of her problem was that she had little to no conviction about BTC and she valued her wealth in dollars (or purses), and she would frequently proclaim that there was a need to live in the present and there were some difficulties that she had with delayed gratification.
I kind of fell out of contact with her, and I am thinking that she surely does not have very many BTC.. maybe she has 1 BTC presently? but I don't know. She was not a dumb person, but she did frequently consider that she had abilities to outsmart the market, and I did attempt to impart some longer term ideas upon her that involved BTC accumulation.. but she had some struggles with those accumulation ideas - and maybe she continued to see a bubble or had fears of the BTC price falling so she could not hang onto her BTC through such periods.
I might have even started some her issues because I recall that somewhere in mid-to-late 2015, Circle had changed one of its features to depict account value in dollars rather than BTC, and my mom told me that she had clicked on that button (I believe that my mom may have had 20 or so BTC at that time, perhaps?), and the BTC price was around $230, and I said "holy fuck.. they tricked you into selling all of your BTC" You better "unclick that button" as soon as possible to get back your BTC, otherwise you are going to get screwed if the BTC price goes shooting up and all your account (that you believe to be in BTC) is in dollars. My mom followed my suggestion, and my GF said that part of her reason for playing around with converting her whole BTC stash back and forth between BTC and dollars was because I told her about that converting feature that existed on the Circle platform, and we both had laughed when my mom had converted all of her BTC into dollars - kind of implying that we were both smarter than my mom.. hahahahahaha. Through the years, my mom had proven herself to be quite a bit smarter than that GF because even though she had some trouble getting back up to her all time high holdings of 21 BTC or so (perhaps similar to you, micky123, she still has a pretty decently sized stash, even though I think that she cashed out around 4 BTC in the $14ks in 2018. .and maybe she has been cashing out a few here and there along the way.
Anyhow, I am having some trouble relating to anyone who has known about bitcoin, and who had been into BTC for 7 years or so to actually have only in the neighborhood of 1 BTC.. even though I do understand that there might be ways of explaining it, it seems to not be a very good example of how to approach this asset class.