Quote from: strawbs on March 28, 2020, 02:46:49 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on March 28, 2020, 03:23:16 AM

Quote from: strawbs on March 27, 2020, 11:35:01 PM

Quote from: Torque on March 27, 2020, 02:39:56 PM

I'll just leave this epic rant about the $2T (*cough* $14T *cough*) bailout bill here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-7uro3A3qU

People often say, well what can the Average Joe do about it? March? Riot? Revolution?

Bitcoin was *literally* created for this reason. It IS the red pill. It IS the Revolution.

#BUYBTC and stop participating in the corrupt fiat monetary system.

Spot on. But I expected the BTC price to have responded by now. So strange that there is still confidence in USD (or any fiat) after the recent creation of a squillion, gazillion USD out of thin air.

#only21million - yet not reflected in the current price.

I can only conclude that very, very few people understand that BTC has a finite supply that cannot be altered. I suspect this is true even of a majority of investors (and this is somewhat substantiated by acquaintances who bought in during the late-2017 hype. They knew nothing of the tech but simply had a huge dose of FOMO).

Let's say for example, there are such persons who invested a decent amount of their initial Lump sum of their initial investment into BTC between early December 2017 and late February 2018, and so they mostly blew their wadd during the highest BTC price points, so their average cost per BTC was around $12k. Let's say that they had a lump sum of $24k, so they got 2 BTC out of the deal.

So, after March 2018, they had come to feeling a bit disgruntled because they had invested so much into bitcoin, and so at that point, they pondered the situation and rationally concluded that all that they could really reasonably do is to dollar cost average into bitcoin for another year or so, and see where that takes them, so for the next year, until about March 2019 they decide to dollar cost average into bitcoin at about $100 per week which ends up being another $5,200 invested into bitcoin by March 2019. So let's say that DCA tactic had gotten them another .825 BTC.

Now they have 2.825 BTC and $29,200 invested, which is still about $10,336 per BTC, so they are still a bit aggravated that they are mostly NOT in profits, and they are actually underwater by around 63% because the price at that time is bouncing around in the $3,800 territory.

Remember bitcoin prices had gone from supra $6ks through most of 2018 to testing support in the lower $3ks in November/December 2018, and even largely got stagnated below $4k for most of the first quarter of 2019.

In the meantime, this hypothetical FOMO buyer from 2017 had been studying into bitcoin and studying into their investment to create some conviction about bitcoin as a dollar hedge, yet they realized that they made some mistakes by throwing so much of their available lump sum investment capital at bitcoin in late 2017 and early 2018, and really they were lucky enough to have a decent enough of a job that they could continue to spare $400 a month for continued DCAing, and they continued to believe in bitcoin and to plug away at their dollar cost averaging approach, even considering that $400 per month was not really breaking them, was allowing them to continue to stack sats and was tending to bring down their average cost per BTC with the passage of additional time buying BTC, so between March 2019 and present, they decided to continue with DCA at $100 per week for another year between March 2019 and present, which ends up resulting in the accumulation of about the same amount of BTC .825 or something like that for that next year between March 2019 and March 2020.

So, if we look at https://dcabtc.com?sd=2018-03-27&sda=2_years&f=weekly&d=2_years&ac=10000&c=true, we will see that investing $100 per week into BTC for the past two years, would have gotten the investor 1.635 BTC at a cost of $10,500, so that investor would be a little below break even for those BTC from the past two years, but if we add those BTC to the 2BTC from the initial lumpsum investment, the investor is still a bit in the red with his/her BTC investment, but still with a decently likely road to profit ahead.

The investor would have a total of 3.635 BTC, and an investment of $34,500 - which would be $9,491 per BTC. Of course, our current BTC floating price is around $6,250, so such investor would currently still be 35% in the red, even though such investor would have been close to break even during much of February 2020 but the portfolio of this particular FOMO'd in investor still does not seem to be a bad place to be, with a building level of sats, more knowledge about bitcoin, and continuing to DCA with a reasonable amount such as $100 per week is likely to lead to more stacking of BTC, with a reasonable expectation to be in profits in the future, especially if such investor has developed a 5-10 year investment timeline.. and maybe even a longer investment timeline would likely even show more possibilities for a pay off, even though part of the problem was getting in and investing so much at the top of the cycle, but still there is a quite a bit of hope for an investment portfolio like this that continues to just stock away extra side money that they can afford to lose if shit goes to zero.. (which is also seeming increasingly unlikely given the whole state of the bitcoin blockchain and project as a whole, including ongoing building of networking effects, etc).

A person with such an investment profile, might choose to double down at this stage, and hopefully did not do a mindrust when seeing the BTC price drop down to $3,850 a couple of weeks ago.. and did not get out completely in the mid $4ks.

Yeah, sure, BTC prices might return to test $3,850 or even to test $3,124 again, but that potentiality seems like buy opportunity territory to me, because any BTC price below $3k seems almost completely unsustainable under current market conditions, including the fact that bitcoin is not broken in any way, especially with the halvening coming up, and surely bitcoin is likely to continue to serve as a real decent hedge to the "printer goes brrrrr" philosophy that is currently being shown as the solution to a virus and shutting down of industries problem that had already been largely caused by previous "printer goes brrrrrr"... but previously such "printer goes brrrr" philosophy had not been adequately named nor identified.

But you're making the huge assumption that people who invested in late 2017 are likely to continue investing with a DCA approach.

No I am not. I am making an example of what might happened if someone approached the situation in a dollar cost averaging way, even if they fucked up in the beginning by buying too much too soon - especially after a 78x price appreciation, anyone with any brains should have come at bitcoin with some caution instead of lump summing in and then sitting on their hands and whining about their dumbass and obvious mistake.

Quote from: strawbs on March 28, 2020, 02:46:49 PM

My acquaintances who invested at that time, later sold at a loss and didn't get back in.

Yes. People are dumb. I know people like that too. Fuck them.

Quote from: strawbs on March 28, 2020, 02:46:49 PM

Like the majority of those investors, they probably don't even know what DCA is.

Well, I doubt that it is helpful to be sympathetic to people who either gamble too much or they do not even try to learn.

DCA is a common and wide-spread principle that can be learned.

Quote from: strawbs on March 28, 2020, 02:46:49 PM

But my question remains - why so very few people understand that BTC has a finite supply that cannot be altered and should therefore be trusted to hold value more than infinitely supplied fiat.

Actually, I agree with you on that point. There are a lot of people who just believe mainstream media bullshit and they are scared of bitcoin.

I saw an old friend today, and we were talking about the downfall in the markets and I ended up mentioning bitcoin, and the guy admitted that he did not really know what the fuck bitcoin is, but he still had an opinion that he had heard about bitcoin but currently it is too late to get into bitcoin. A lot of people believe that since bitcoin already had a lot of upward performance, that it is too late to buy bitcoin. They do not understand what is limited supply, and sure, maybe a few are learning here and there, but it is still going to take a whole fucking long time for people to learn.

Yet, it seems to me that people who actively attempt to engage with bitcoin are going to learn about bitcoin, and sure some of them are going to get burnt along the way, but they have to learn how to approach it with moderation rather than gambling with it.. and if they gamble, they better be ready to lose or have a back up plan in the event that their gamble does not pay off... which frequently is DCA investing or some modified version of DCA that might involve buying on dips and/or various attempts to front load their investment and to HODL through bad situations, if they happen to invest too much on a downturn.

Even experienced folks, like mindrust, get burned out, and then end up panicking and coming back with what seems to be an inadequate approach (though it is still possible that he will either get lucky or maybe wisen up with his approach - either way, each person has to live with their choices and their customization of their approach to bitcoin, and bitcoin could give less than two shits about them.. so bitcoin is going to be around long enough and they will have more and more chances to come back to bitcoin and to fix their approach in such a way that they will be able to profit from the likely ongoing volatility of bitcoin, especially having enough patience to figure out how to profit in regards to bitcoins ongoing volatility to the upside...

What is so difficult of just buying and having at least a four year time horizon before even thinking about cashing out anything that you bought and if you time horizon is even longer, like 10 years to 15 years, then it is even more likely that you will profit stupendously... of course it is better that people learn those ideas while they still have a long enough time horizon to profit from bitcoin's likely ongoing gravitation of value dynamics.... and better to get into bitcoin now, than to wait until 2030... we are all still early, and some people just do NOT appreciate the value of patience and the allowance of the passage of time without getting shaken out of their coins.