Speaking of hodling, if I may emphasize, especially to those who are still thinking twice until now, time isn't on our side, folks. I may sound as if I'm inciting FOMO, but that's the reality. The train will leave at some point. To those who are putting off buying every time, you might indeed miss out the opportunity. Yeah, we can buy anytime. Yeah, we can buy small portions. But hodling is nothing else but about price appreciation.
Gone are the days when hodlers are easily rewarded x1000, x2000, x5000, and even higher growths. Gone are days when hodlers are rewarded with x100, x200 growths. Gone even are the days when x10, x20, x50 growths are within arm's reach to hodlers. Time will come even x3 and x5 will take many years.
I don't disagree with your overall point about the higher levels of BTC price appreciation are likely going to be much more difficult to achieve, but they still are not impossible...especially since bitcoin is about 1/20th of the market cap of gold, but bitcoin is about 1,000x better than gold, so bitcoin does likely have another 20,000x of price appreciation before reaching all of its likely addressable market and it could take 50-200 years for bitcoin to reach its total addressable market.. and it is not even guaranteed to make gold parity, eve though many folks do recognize bitcoin being in the ballpark of 1,000x better than gold.
So whenever we invest into anything we can look at downside versus upside and also consider that even though bitcoin does not have as much upside potential, its investment thesis is likely stronger today than it has ever been, yet there are still a lot of folks who are barely even learning about bitcoin and barely even getting to the point of considering investing into it, whether it is through some kind of ETF or buying it directly.. and surely the ETF is the inferior product, yet many folks (besides already established bitcoiners) realize that direct ownership of bitcoin is the superior product.
Indeed, Bitcoin is better than gold in many aspects, but I don't see it overtaking gold anytime soon. As a matter of fact, I don't think Bitcoin's market cap will come close to gold's in the next decade. The huge potential is there, of course, but it will certainly take a much longer term for a new hodler to gain what could be reached in a mere blink of an eye in the past.
For now, 4 years is more or less enough for a Bitcoin investor to be of profit. To those who will come late, however, those who will finally do the buying at $100,000, $120,000, or $150,000, a price they deserve, 4 years might not be enough for their investment to even double. In which case, a simple business venture might fare better.