base cost of a coin should help miners to determine whether they are going to mine or not mine.... including help them to decide the extent to which they will expand or shrink operations or attempt to make their operations more efficient in order to attempt to be profitable.
While this is basically true, it's worth noting that mining expansion has typically been limited by equipment availability (once things got past the initial "anyone interested in this thing?" phase). This has lead to mining not quite following price which may partly explain the misapprehension of price following hash.
Sure... Even non-miners are aware of some of the supply chain issues and even some historical reliance on questionable hardware suppliers.. so for sure some of the miners have been considering ways to attempt to be become more vertically integrated.
I do gather that you, richie, are inclined to follow the price follows hashrate nonsense, but you have found a reason for an exceptions, and there are all kinds of exceptions that pretty much swallow the price follows hashrate baloney.... whether we are analyzing from the price side or we get into miner behaviors in regards to how they manage their stash or how they manage their business. we know in recent times, there has been quite a bit of influence of the ideas of Michael Saylor on the mining scene.. and I am talking about the use of debt in order to attempt to hold more coins.. which likely contributes to additional "artificial" (or would you call it an exception) upwards pressures on BTC price.
I appreciate your description, but seems that you would have already established a decently sized bitcoin investment over the past 7+ years that you have been a forum member, no?
When I got into bitcoin in late 2013, I largely front-loaded DCA'ed for a year, and then at some point towards the end of 2014, I had contemplated cashing a portion of my 401k into bitcoin, and that would have largely doubled my BTC investment at that point.. and also brought down my average cost per BTC quite a bit.
After I considered the matter for about one or two weeks, I decided NOT to go through with such a large transfer of value into BTC, and part of my rationale was that I concluded that I had already established a pretty damned large amount of exposure to BTC - including considering that in relation to my various fiat related investments (which would have also included my 401k)..
I don't regret my decision.. even though I could have doubled the size of my BTC stash at that time because I made such decision based on my sense of my total situation and the information that I had in front of me at that time.
Of course, I have a lot of posts on this forum, so in some sense, members can see various ways that my ideas about bitcoin have changed over the year, and largely it seems to me that bitcoin is quite a bit of a better investment these days than it was in either late 2013 or late 2014.. even though we have had a whole hell of a lot of BTC price appreciation between late 2014 and present... so in that regard, whether you doubled your BTC stash or you increased it by some other amount - even 10% or 20%, there is some value in going through a process of considering the totality of your own financial circumstances. which surely would include considering your cashflow, your other investments, your view of bitcoin as compared with other possible investments, your timeline, your risk tolerance and your skills, time and abilities to learn along the way and to tweak your strategies along the way which may also include considering reallocating from time to time, trading and/or the use of financial instruments (including margin), and for me, I have never really been a big advocate of any kinds of gambling techniques, so I am frequently concerned about making any moves that are on the relatively BIGGER side of things.
Hopefully things go well for you, and I hope that your investment timeline for this additional injection is at least 4-10 years, and in that regard, I would have more confidence in the whole situation rather than if you might have been considering the possibility of turning much if any of your additional investment in less than 4 years.
Yes I have been invested in Bitcoin for years but I have sold at times and missed out on the bull runs a couple of times. The main thing for me was changing circumstances in my personal life which led me to think f*ck it and go all in. I was sick of saving up money and then the adjustment of cost of living taking the benefit of saving up all these years paying into a pension which is not going to benefit me much because of the inflation of fiat. I came into Bitcoin thinking I could make a little but I never expected to be investing all of my savings into it. My opinion of Bitcoin like yours has changed over the years I was very excited about Bitcoin at 1st but over the years I have become less interested but I needed a waking up to reignite that passion and clarity that Bitcoin is special and could be the reason why I am not working at 75 years old because my pension is shit and inflation has f*cked me.
I hope to keep this investment in for at least 5 years I took my age into count and I have a number which I would take half out. I think I will look to keep a % of my wealth in Bitcoin at all times and only withdraw from it when I need to because I have seen how inflation is destroying my wealth in anything except Bitcoin.
I do not know if I have made the right decision yet and I guess I wont know that until I keep the investment for 5 years or I hit my target before then. I have been a slave all my life looking to make as much money as possible working overtime regularly so I will have a comfortable life when I am no longer able to work and my children will have a good start in life but the recent inflation and taxes because of covid and the adjustment to cost of living has proven I was living a pipe dream and the only way I will be able to provide for the future is if I take more risks.
I had a small amount of Bitcoin anyway but I would have had to hope for Bitcoin to hit a very price to become comfortable in later life. That is why I wanted to invest a large amount and hopefully bring that target price of Bitcoin down to a more realistic level. We are no where near yet but I hope in 5 years we will be or close.
Your way of discussing several of the matters and your trade offs does cause me a decent amount of concern - especially in terms of your ability to HODL through potential tough times.
For sure, there is a lot of empirical evidence to show that lump sum investing has tended to pay off even better than DCA - especially when the buying was upon dips.. but we can never really know the extent to which a dip is over.. so there tends to be some value in having some strategies besides lump sum, such as an ability to continue to buy on further dips... otherwise you just have to HODL through the whole dip period, if it ends up coming and taking a long time to resolve...and hopefully you would not end up panicing in the meantime.
Personally, since you did a pretty decent lump sum investment, maybe you should plan to carry out a DCA plan at any time that the BTC price get's close to your buy-in price.. even if your DCA amount is ONLY $10 per week (maybe $100 per week would be better?).. it might give you some peace of mind if we ever go below your average buy price.
Usually the plan for having at least a 4-year plan would be that if you bought at the top of the cycle then you would still have pretty decent chances of at least being profitable after 4 years.. maybe not extremely profitable, but at least not in the red.. and there are no guarantees of that, either, even though BTC's investment thesis does seem to be quite a bit stronger now than it was 7-8 years ago.
Regarding cashing out, sure of course you might want to attempt to time tops somewhat, but you still gotta be careful about cashing out too much because where you going to put it that is better than BTC? You could consider cashing out more incrementally such as quarterly, yearly or some timeline variation that is comfortable, but you might need to be careful that you might end up taking out at the wrong times.. but sure if you cash out a quarter or a years worth of expected expenses, then that would likely be reasonable.
You know about the 4% per year theory regarding cashing out too, right? That has traditionally been the guidance for traditional investments, even though I do believe with BTC you could get away with larger percentages depending on how you value your holdings. Also, if you are planning not to cash out any BTC for 5 years, you do have 5 years to figure out those kinds of matters, but you could attempt to project out values and cash out plans in terms of best case scenarios, worse case scenarios and even medium case scenarios.. and for sure there is value to give some serious considerations to the worse case scenarios, even though if they are not really very likely it is better to have a way of keeping in mind a range of scenarios while focusing more of your attention on more likely scenarios and perhaps revisiting the projections from time to time to see if you might need to tweak them.
Regarding your cold storage, you should check them a few times a year to make sure that you understand your recovery and if you might have back up ways to recover.. and once you go through the process a few times, you might be able to just do it once a year.. depending on how complicated that you have made it for yourself.. ..but for sure both complication and too much simplicity could be enemies.. so some kind of balance is going to be preferred.