Every investment has a risk of loss, but at least in Bitcoin we can minimize losses by not selling it when the price goes down.
That is not how you minimize loss. You minimize loss by not investing more than you can afford to lose. So yeah maybe you do not sell on the way down and you ONLY buy when the BTC price goes down, but at the same time, you still could end up losing all your bitcoin, and if you keep buying as the price is dropping, you could end up losing even more and more and more, especially if the BTC price never ends up recovering enough for you to get your investment amount back.
We can agree to disagree. I stand by the points that I made in my earlier post.
Yes, perhaps among those who are still laypeople, of course, they think that investing in Bitcoin has a bigger risk because the price fluctuates, but the loss is purely due to their own decision.
Trading does increase the kinds of risks, and so sometimes the traders could end up either losing all their money faster or they could even lose more than the amount of bitcoin that they buy.. buy using leverage. Leverage in either direction could contribute to an investment like bitcoin becoming a loser, even though so many people who have ONLY bought bitcoin (and who have ONLY gone long bitcoin) have tended to end up being in profits sooner or later.. especially the longer that they are in bitcoin, and the most that they are risking is 100% of what they put into bitcoin, but so many folks have ended up in profits, and even now if you have been in bitcoin for 2 years or longer then you have pretty good chances of being in profits if you continued to invest along the way, yet of course, there are folks who may well have had front loaded their investment into BTC at prices higher than today (higher than $36,400) and even if some of them continued to buy bitcoin, they still might be in the negative if they invested higher amounts of their value when the BTC price was higher than it is today... So sometimes it can take 3-4 years or more just to get back in the black, even with a strategy that is ONLY buying BTC and not engaging in other kinds of tactics to trade and/or to leverage. And, even getting back in the black is not guaranteed, but surely it seems that if someone has invested in such a way that they continue to buy over several years, even if they front-loaded their investment at higher prices, there are decent odds that they are going to get back in the black, even if it is not guaranteed.. and since it is not guaranteed, that is why people have to choose a position size that is not too much and they are willing to lose the amount invested in the event that the BTC price does not return to prices higher than their earlier purchase prices nor to prices that are higher than their average costs per BTC.
If any of us might have started buying in the $50ks and then stopped buying when the BTC price went down, then we retain our average cost per BTC in the $50ks. Sure if we keep buying then we lower our cost per BTC, but we do not reduce the cost of the earlier BTC that we bought.
Don't get me wrong, I advocate the continued and ongoing purchasing of BTC, and maybe we are explaining the dynamics of how risk might be reduced differently... But still continuing to buy does not necessarily reduce risk, even though it may well cause the need for the BTC price to go up to be less than it would be if sticking with ONLY the purchases above $50k.
Maybe those who lose are those with weak hands who are unable to survive when the market is down. such actions could result in them incurring losses if they sell it. In long-term investments, of course they are ready for all the consequences they will face. They must have a target to achieve big profits and not sell when the market is red.
That is one of the problems of buying too much BTC at once (such as lump sum investing and/or front-loading the BTC investment) rather than being prepared to continue to buy on the way down, and realizing that there is a need to buy no more than you can afford to lose.. really afford to lose by being committed to riding the investment to zero if the BTC price keeps going down rather than continuing to go up.I am a bit unclear of your point here. You are suggesting that since you have not seen shitcoins go to zero, then bitcoin's chances of going to zero are even less than the odds of shitcoins going to zero. Your logic seems to be quite a bit less clear than the points that I was making in regards to accounting for negative scenarios in bitcoin and who gives any shits about shitcoins in order to make the points that bitcoin could have negative price scenarios that are outside of your expectations, but you should attempt to account for them, even if they might be lower level scenarios.
In comparison, Bitcoin can have a greater ROI compared to other investments and this has been proven by the increase in the price of Bitcoin which reached $69k at the previous ATH.
We can see that price history already happened, but it does not prove that BTC prices will return to such prices, even though surely it seems that the investment thesis for bitcoin today is stronger than what it was in 2021, but we might not know all of the facts that we need to know, and maybe there could be developments that contribute towards no more pumps of BTC and the possibility that BTC prices never get back above $37k (for example) or even more difficulties to get back to $69k.. Sure in recent times, I had already made some posts that I believe that bitcoin has something between 70% and 80% odds of reaching $69k or higher before the end of 2025; however, 70% to 80% odds are still not even close to 100% odds.. that means that in my own thinking there are 20% to 30% odds that $69k will not be reached prior to the end of 2025. And, hey I am not claiming that I know anything beyond my own opinion being similar to the opinions of others, yet I believe my opinion is stronger and more based in reality than someone who might still be considering that the odds of getting to $69k in the next 2.1 years is close to 95% or even 100%, and so sure you are free to believe whatever you like, but I think that it is a bit unrealistic to be placing too high of odds on various UPside scenarios and completely negating the odds of downside scenarios, even if the odds for up happen to be greater than the odds for down...
The mere fact that the odds are greater does not mean that the scenario with the greater odds is going to end up playing out. If we are in BTC, we should know those kinds of things and also practice risk management behaviors that account for possible scenarios in which lower probability outcomes might end up playing out rather than the higher probability outcomes.
The upside versus downside scenarios seem to be more nuanced than how you seem to be describing them, but I would be willing to concede that we are arguing over semantics rather than substance, and I see no reason to modify anything that I had already stated on the topic.
So, don't assume that Bitcoin will give you profits quickly. To achieve big profits, we need to be patient and ready to invest in the long term. Buying aggressively and taking advantage of falling price opportunities allows you to profit more efficiently when the market becomes bullish.
I agree with these ideas.. except to the extent that you (ginsan) seem to believe that the long term causes a guaranteed that you are going to end up being profitable, which it does not.The fact that someone does not consider profits to be guaranteed does not necessarily mean that s/he has NOT invested enough into bitcoin. On a personal level, by the time, late 2014 came and I kind of figured out my BTC accumulation targets, I was ONLY targeting investing 10% of my investment portfolio into BTC, but by the time we got to the end of 2015, I had gotten to around 13.5% invested, which was higher than my target, but still was not the limit of my capabilities, and surely my BTC profits went up stupendously between 2015 and currently, and surely there was no need to aim for BIGGER profits, even though they would have had been possible, and personally I consider that the balance had worked out pretty well, even though the 86.5% of my investment portfolio from 2015 had ONLY less than doubled in value until now, but my BTC went up more than 37x (accounting for some mistakes that were made along the way too).. but still, part of the point that I am making is that you can invest for various UPside scenarios without even considering upside to be even close to guaranteed, but at the same time to be prepared for various downside scenarios too.
Surely you have been registered on the forum for nearly as long as me, but I hardly can know if you are managing your psychology and your finances in a way that accounts for a variety of scenarios. Surely we are posting in a public forum, so whatever my comments responding to your points are not personal, and you can do whatever you like in terms of managing your expectations.. and how you prepare for various short, medium and/or longer term scenarios
I get some senses that we are not just arguing about semantics, but I also get a sense that you have differing ideas from me (more than just how we are expressing ourselves) about how to think about probabilities of some things happening in comparison to what ultimately ends up happening.
I am not necessarily going to stop responding when I differ in opinion from another member, and I believe that a point needs to be clarified, but sometimes I am not going to feel any need to repeat points that I already made, even though sometimes if I am being directly confronted, I might choose to attempt to clarify, to the extent that I might feel that it is possible to clarify without too much just attempting to repeat points that I feel that I had already made more clearly at an earlier time.