ive never panic sold btc but, like you, ive sorta "panic bought" things, which is basically the same. of course in 2011-2013 or so there was a lot less confidence in btc so the ability to turn majick internetz money into real stuff was an easy sell.
ive looked up my prev mining addys when i gpu mined btc as i wanted to sign messages saying those addys were mine for various purposes if needed. cringworthy is an understatement as to the amount btc that i mined. ive got a small fraction left, and thats all that matters. its a win in my book. no regerts.
TL;DR: HODL is the best stratagy.
I guess you and Searing share the factor that you were earning some of your income in BTC rather than in fiat, so one thing that puts any BTC earner in the lead of a fiat earner is that s/he is forced to consider his/her HODL strategy ... or allocation regarding what is the ratio of BTC to fiat. So, there is an implied knowledge of BTC, and a likely conscious measure regarding how much of that value needs to be treated like a longer term investment versus used for daily living expenses.
it is a different mindset. i had a strategy for mining that worked for my situation as far as how much was long term vs play btc. but also consider at that time i wasnt in in for the long term value that may or may not moon/crater at any moment. it was for fun and belief in the tech. i wanted to use it. not just collect it.
i still have that respect of course. but with the 50 thousand percent increase in value (or whatever it is) now greed factors in
I get that too.
There can be a certain amount of nerdiness in early adopter-ness of BTC... and that nerdiness can attract some folks to gravitate into shitcoins way more than the shitcoins deserve because there seems to be a lot of potential innovation that is confusing regarding the value contribution potentials - without realizing that there is also a lot of innovation going on with bitcoin, too, even while there might be more nerdy stuff going on with a number of the shitcoins, including the fact that some guys could get into shitcoins and learn all aspects of the coin, which might be a lot harder to do in bitcoin, even in terms of getting any of your ideas heard in bitcoin when there seem to be so many really smart people who might already be working on ideas that you thought that you had in regard to some potential bitcoin innovation.
But, yeah, mindset could change significantly with some people who might have bought into BTC early or played around with the tech early, and then kind of forgot about their dust wallets (that currently have a lot of value), and sure some early nerds likely had purposefully cleared the various dust from their wallets, including making some (now seemingly) dumb purchases with their dust wallets - but geez the value had gone up...
And, on the other side of that coin, there continue to be a lot of people who tell stories that fall into a kind of common theme about thinking that they understand bitcoin because they had heard the word several times but then later they realize that they did not know shit because they were too willing to lump bitcoin into a kind of category that ended up being inaccurate.. even old-timer bitcoiners can be a bit guilty of that (including yours truly, even though I hate to think of myself as an old timer when my bitcoin (mind-kinda-blown) starting point is in the late 2013/early 2014 arena).
