Things like this are normal because no one can predict the crypto market perfectly. Selling at the highest price is everyone's goal, but this can also make you lose the best momentum to sell. I have experienced this, I waited for the price to continue to rise in the hope of being able to sell at the highest price, but what happened after that was that the price fell. Profit is the main goal of investment, but you should not be greedy.
The main thing which everyone wants is to take profit and sell their coin at a higher cost but most of the time people leave their coin when the price goes higher because they don't want to sell at that price and wish the market to pump some more. But after a few months they realised that the market is going down instead of pumping then they start to regret missing the chance.
It is a better way to enjoy your profit if you are happy with your profit when you see that in future the market is pumping more because you have not sold it as profit instead of losing any amount. Be satisfied with what you have and don't look towards the profit of others because everyone has different goals, thoughts, invested amounts, buying and selling costs.
Yeah,
our endpoint is profit but only those without plan, target will get caught in this analogy of yours especially those who were present for immediate profit (gambling Bitcoin prices). Every financial market has time or seasons, let me say something have we considered why; Price sells from a particular point and why it buys from a point too, who were those involved, who bought at that higher price, who sold at that price, this are simple question we ought to clearify.
I always and will keep laying emphasis on the need for having a target and being discipline, DCAing with getting exhausted and allow the market do it thing and not being fretful because of pump or dumps in the market.
It is still not correct to presume that the end-point for everyone is "profit." Sure there is desires of long term investors to both store value in a way that may not lose value as much as other assets.. or to have some different correlation in terms of how the investment (bitcoin in this case) holds its value relative to other assets - which it the description of a hedge.
So there can be various ways to accomplish goals of holding value, hedging and even perhaps having more options down the road, while at the same time recognizing that there are scenarios in which bitcoin may well not hold its value as well as other assets even in the long run and even when trying to not get distracted by short-term BTC price movements.
The main key on here is that you should really be that investing on the amount on which you can afford to lose on which this has been always the main principle on the moment that you will be making an investment on which proper planning and risks management.
when you're talking about proper planning and risk management, it's not to suggest that you're investing with an amount you're able to loose but deals with being calculative enough to make provision for a portion that's going to allow you continue holding your asset without getting tempted to sell half way. The phrase
what you can afford to loose is a gambling phrase that is mostly used to tell gamblers not to go too extreme with the amount they use in gambling. For Bitcoin, for as much as we know, we've not seen it as an asset that can ever go to zero as much as we have seen it grow and so it's somehow improper to use such phrase in this kind of scenario.
I consider the idea/suggestion of investing no more than you can afford to lose to also apply to investing.. not just trading and/or gambling and maybe it applies more with volatile assets like bitcoin, even though the reality is that there is no sure investment - even though some investments are more volatile and/or risky than others.
And, sure are characterizing bitcoin as something that is more of a stable investment - and surely that seems to increasingly be the situation with bitcoin, even though there continues to be risk with bitcoin, including but not limited to the risk of it going to zero.
But I think pretty much the only threat that could drive bitcoin to zero is when there is some technological mess or advancement that makes bitcoin redundant or useless because there is something better than it. Otherwise I understand there can be unforeseen developments, but what else could there be in the near future with a similar or stronger security architecture and predictability? A fixed mathematical schedule for emission and the security through redundancy in the nodes globally distributed and holding the data, it seems to me that there can't be much that is better overall.
The solution to the SPOF problematic is so unique that I don't see how this could be done with a higher level of security.
The biggest problem still are the fees at times for people who do it right and want to manage their own wallets instead of buying it and leaving it on an exchange or as some derivative from some corporation dealing with bitcoin (ETFs for instance). For small investors it is still a hassle, but I doubt that the fee problem will be solved to a degree in the near future where people with small budgets can reliably follow a DCA plan. Then again I doubt that there will never be a solution.
There is also lots of dilution from many of the shit coins. Bitcoin represents about half of the total crypto market cap, but their hope is to hit the so called bitcoin killer. But I get that smaller investors would like to get into the market, but then realize that their $100 DCA investment every two weeks is sometimes stuck because it costs $20 to get the money off the exchange. A simple layer is required that may not offer the same level of security, but still allows small investors to move their bitcoin. The lightning network still sounds too complicated for the vast majority to be used, it scares them away and I get the point. By now you have all these gamified apps that allow you to trade everything and since it is simple, they tend to prefer those apps and trade there.
And sometimes I think the mystic around Nakamoto can be interesting to some investors on the one hand, but scary to others on the other hand as they fear there could be some ill intentions on behalf of the founder, like it comes to light that some rogue state brought bitcoin to life and does hold the majority of the coins. It's not that I am afraid of it, but it could be an explanation for some people to stay away since they rather have a figure they can see and assess. Take Elon Musk as an example or Steve Jobs: whether you like them or not, but those who do feel more comfortable when they actually can see what someone is doing and how they are behaving.
After all, bitcoin is a very different investment compared to owning shares in a company that has a cashflow and a financial report. The good thing is there is no blowing up of bitcoin because someone faked financial data, like there was with some big financial corporations or any of the accounting scandals. It is all mathematical and hence the happenings within the network are clearly predictable (I mean the hard data, not things like price manipulation). In a corporation you can't tell what someone might do next, It is an aspect I like a lot about bitcoin and that is why I am confident it won't go to zero as it will still have value for various groups of people. Value preservation, highest mobility of any asset in the world and autarchy if someone does it correctly.
To me, it seems that you are not wrong in any of your specific assessments, yet I personally do not even feel that I know enough about how to get into specifics instead of just potentially having some ballpark ideas regarding known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and sure you may well be listing some aspect of known knowns- yet the world of probabilities have a lot of various kinds of ways of assigning percentages that may well end up having a certain amount of subjective elements that each of us have to account for when making our own assessments regarding how we are going to invest into bitcoin and also to prepare ourselves for various negative scenarios as well as the positive scenarios.
Someone who has already invested into BTC for a while (like myself) may well end up engaging in various kinds of hedging in terms of selling some of our stash from time to time, whether we do it in time-based ways or we do it in price-based ways.
The overwhelming majority of the world, perhaps even close to 99%, do not have enough exposure to bitcoin since they most of them do not even own any coin at all... and yeah, maybe 1-2% of the world own some small amount of BTC (or even they are involved in shitcoins and thinking that they have enough BTC exposure).
So I am suggesting that even if some of the various negative scenarios are out there and I am not even going into specifics of them, that still does not mean that people generally have enough BTC.. and most people need to get the fuck off of zero... surely there are some folks who invest into bitcoin, and they do not have very much value, so they are continuing to buy BTC as if it were to be guaranteed to be going up, and so that seems to be problematic in the sense that anyone who has a very bullish outlook on BTC, should still be careful about assuming that nothing but UP is guaranteed.. or they might concede that there is UP and DOWN in the short term, but in the long term, no matter what UP is guaranteed.. which also is not true..
In the end people can do what they like, and who cares about my various repetitions that it is good to keep in mind the negative scenarios too, even if you are mostly preparing for the positive scenarios.. but at the same time, does anyone want to be in the street if they do not have other resources besides being maniacally focused on investing into bitcoin and ONLY bitcoin?
Even with myself, I will admit that I likely have around 80%-ish or more in bitcoin as compared with other assets, yet my bitcoin got to more than 80% of my total investment portfolio holdings based its price appreciation and not due to my investing that much.. since when I got into bitcoin I only got up to around 13.5%-ish invested into bitcoin, and the rest of my investment portfolio could sustain me if bitcoin wer to go to zero.. Yet, bitcoin ended up outperform all of the other assets, and sure those other assets may have gone up around 70-80% in the past 10 years, while bitcoin went up around 68x.. .. so sure maybe my exposure to bitcoin could have had been even higher than more than 80%.. but even if it were to go to zero, those other assets can still support me... so I have investments in places other than just having everything in bitcoin.