You sound mixed up regarding what is "long term investing," and you may well not have any kind of specific timeline for when to get out exactly, even though you might have some ideas in regards to when you might start to need the money, whether that is 4-10 years or further into the future.
Sure having some specific goals into the longer term, such as 5 years or wanting to reach a certain amount, could have some relationships to long term or maybe overlap with the idea of long term or difficult to achieve goals that may or may not be reached... so some of the ways that you are framing long term could also fit within the category of long term thinking about investing.. . but you do not have to have any of those kinds of specifics...
You could have long term plans and intentions to stay with your investment 4-10 years or longer, while also recognizing that you have discretion to change your mind at any time or that you might want to make sure that you always have some ways of exiting the investment, even if you are not planning to exit, but you want to make sure that you can exit if you feel that you need to (or change your mind and want to).
Of course, you are less likely to be successful in your investment if you end up pulling out early.. so there is a lot of power in making sure that you can stay in.. but surely you also have complete autonomy over your own life and your investments, even if you end up screwing it up.. .. and there even could be some rare scenarios that getting out ended up being the right thing to do.
So then what is our approach as long term investors if we don't have any time frame in our mind for how long we would be holding or investing in bitcoin before we sell or start withdrawing, if we don't necessarily need to have a specific exit time, then what should we consider as our aim for holding, cause I do know that most persons approach investing in bitcoin with a profit making mindset and for a while in this thread I've been on the fact that long term holders(with our old definition as persons accumulate Bitcoin for a longer time frame) do have bigger benefits than short term holders for the many reasons we have also established.
If time frame or having a specific time I would stay as an investor or holder isn't what determines a long term holder what does?
Your first paragraph is especially a good framing Wind_FURY.
In that regard, bitcoin provides us with a lot of various kinds of empowerment that is not merely about getting rich - even though getting rich seems to have had historically been an additional benefit that people have been receiving by building their BTC stash and mostly HODLing their BTC stash through many years.
Some people only come for the get-rich part of bitcoin and they are focused on the getting rich part and not even giving any shits about the empowering part, and surely some of these people will evolve in their thinking and understanding of bitcoin, but some of them will never get over the mere monetary focus, which I suppose in several senses if still valid, even though it is incomplete and somewhat superficial way of thinking about and understanding bitcoin... ..
even though as long as we keep building and holding our BTC, we can have very good chances of being able to end up doing both, too.. whether our original intentions had been exclusively on one or another, it still seems that both will continue to play out in the coming years.. and there are some who even say that it is inevitably based on math, even though many of us realize that it is not inevitable, yet bitcoin is a pretty amazingly designed system.. that is likely to persist and even to go up in value, which surely makes it more beneficial to any individuals to be sure to employ consistent, persistent, ongoing and perhaps even aggressive (without over doing it) accumulation strategies.
This is true, a majority of persons approach bitcoin for the get rich part, which has become more famous over the years because of the endless testimonies of people, a majority is still yet to be educated about any other empowerment bitcoin offers, and I think this is also based on usability and adaptation, most people still buy bitcoin for the sake of profit even if on the long term, this seems to be the case for me too and that's why I became a little confused and asked what should be our approach to bitcoin as long term holders.
These are decent points about any decisions to sell when a person is wanting to get more BTC should be considered in light that the price might not ever drop back down, so usually the sell amounts would be relatively small, especially if a person is in BTC accumulation stages, and any one still accumulating is going to end up feeling quite uncomfortable if he sells some BTC but the price keeps going up and then he is accumulating a lot of cash and feeling a need to buy, so he ends up buying way higher than his earlier sell price.
So I think from this, it's not really bad to sell a little bitcoin with the aim of getting more bitcoin, but this could also backfire at you if the price goes higher and then you've sold your bitcoin holdings and you would have to now buy at a higher rate.