The idea of HODL is entirely up to you and your greed level. If you wish to have trust in the project, then, its entirely up to you.
Before one can make an investment decision, either trusting the project or not should be part of the things to be considered before going into that coin, as there are a lot of fake projects out there whose intentions are just to rug pull.
That is why people are always directed to make their investment decisions wisely and choose coins or tokens that have some credibility. Bitcoin is one of the most highly recommended, and I believe that's where this topic is channeled.
Holding is never to be considered greedy, as we all have our reasons for buying and holding Bitcoin. There are people out there, and their main objective is to just buy and sell and take profit where necessary, which I believe most of the time is not really a good way to go. When it happens that they have hit their price target, instead of taking profit as they had planned before entering the market, they decide to wait longer in order for the gain output to be a little bigger, but when the reverse becomes the case, such an action could be considered greed.
But when one's plan is just to buy and hold as many bitcoins as he can afford, even when the price hits ATH, they still decide to hold and accumulate more. That's not greediness; they are actual hodlers who don't care about price but focus on how many they can accumulate within a certain period of time.
Yes, I agree with this, we have full rights over the decisions we will make. But what must be noted is that we must base this on science. But when it comes to bitcoin then I fully believe, I will not say that I believe once I know btc, it must be a long journey for me to make me sure that I am not wrong to invest in bitcoin, and in the end now I am truly confident in the bitcoin that I hold, unlike the case when I invest in other coins, I do not put full trust, therefore I always make short-term investments only.
I would not recommend for people who half-heartedly invest in bitcoin in the long run, the article will be a risk that might turn around that should get a profit instead get a loss, because of several things, they panic, they are affected by FUD and other things that make them sell bitcoin at a lower price than the price they bought, including also on less mature planning.
Remember here we are not fighting luck, but we are in a situation where we have to hold strong, and that will certainly be very related to our planning at the beginning.
It would be a shame if we had to stop in the middle of the road because our planning was not well-organized.
I mostly agree with you bitLeap in terms of sometimes newbies might be too weak in terms of their being uncertain about their investment into bitcoin, and therefore, they end up experiencing regrets at various points along the way, and perhaps a lack of a plan for how to financially and emotionally deal with BTC prices that might go in a downity direction that they had not expected and perhaps to stay in such downity direction for much longer than they had expected.
This is as if you are talking to me directly. It was real torture when I first bought Bitcoin after a friend convinced me to buy that I will make quick profit. As a student, it was not easy watching my investment down by almost 20% in few weeks. Well I am happy my friend was patient with me, giving me all the support and encouragement I needed then, so it took me time to begin to understand how the market works.
Those unexpected down positions end up being great situations for either buying more BTC and/or holding, as is the theme of this thread. So it seems to me that the solution for newbies might well have to do with starting out with a position size that is sufficiently small in order that they are not necessarily going to feel uncomfortable and panic if the BTC price goes down instead of up.... I doubt that the solution is necessarily to plan more .. even though sometimes it can be difficult to say how each person should attempt to deal with his/her own situation - especially since we likely realize that if the person does not invest enough, then they are also going to regret their decision if the BTC price ends up going up and they feel as if they did not buy enough.
I am still in crypto today is because of one statement from my friend that introduced me. According to him, "you will regret more for opportunities you did not take than opportunities you did and they went bad". This was what changed my mind and gave me the counrage to forge ahead.
Everyone has these kinds of balancing dilemmas, and such balancing dilemmas seem to be worse for newbies, because it can take a while to both build a BTC portfolio of significant size and also to have such BTC portfolio be in profits.
This is what I am seriously working on now... I know it's gonna take some time to be completely incharge of my emotions and also have the technicality needed to manage my portfolio perfectly well as once in a while the fear do still come.