I try to be careful in regards to using absolutes, because sometimes guys can do better (at least in the short term) by taking profits, trading and gambling with their investment, so each of us has to figure out what our goals are, and surely even though sometimes, we might be able to make more short term profits by trading and/or gambling, those do not tend to be good practices overall in terms of both long term investing and putting yourself into a mindset of accumulating bitcoin, since many guys have goals to accumulate bitcoin, and sometimes they sell their bitcoin in order to buy back cheaper or they believe that they can get more bitcoin by trying to play bitcoin price waves, and so I am not going to proclaim that strategy never works, but such trading/gambling strategy is generally not a good approach to both long term investing and goals to continue to increase your bitcoin stash.

Guys have to choose for themselves including if they want to gamble and to take chances and to potentially lose their focus on accumulating BTC.

It is also difficult to tell anyone when they might have enough bitcoin or if they are in a position in which they might do something other than straight-forward DCA - which surely seems to be the best approach for guys in their first 4-10 years or when they are in their relatively earlier stages of accumulating BTC.. yet at the same time, there could be situations in which a guy might have ended up front loading his investment or overly accumulating bitcoin in one way or another, at least in the short term, so those kind of guys might be in a position to sell some BTC as the BTC price is going up... so it can be difficult to have strict rules that apply to everyone, even though many of us might realize that it takes a long time to accumulate a BTC stash, and it may also be a long time before we are able to assess ourselves as being in an overaccumulated status.

For example, it does tend to be very difficult to assess someone who might have a $50k per year status and who is accumulating bitcoin at $100 per week to have gotten himself into an overaccumulated status in less than 4 years, since after 4 years, at $100 per week) he would have had ONLY invested right around $20,800 invested which is ONLY around 1/2 of a year's salary..  so we might need some other kinds of facts to come to the conclusion that the guy might have had overaccumulated, whether he did such overaccumulation in a prudent way or if he had made some kind of an aggressive mistake in terms of how he allocated. and yeah there could be examples of the same guy who might have had front loaded his investment in the first 1-2 years (by even taking from an investment portfolio that he had), so then such a guy might end up getting into an overaccumulation status in an earlier kind of timeline than the guy who is just attempting to do aggressive weekly DCA, whether it is $100 per week or some other amount..


Taking profits sounds like trading.  Hopefully we are not devolving into that?


That plays into my own rationale, which is whenever a guy might get into a practice of selling BTC on the way up, it is better to understand that BTC as being something that you are selling and without any expectation to be able to buy back, so I still would not consider that as taking profits, even though selling on the way up could serve as a kind of hedge and/or insurance in case the price falls back down, but it hardly makes sense to get into the mindset of selling on the way up unless you are pretty much already satisfied with the size of your stash, so that if the BTC price keeps going up without correcting back down, then you have enough that you could just continue to sell on the way up and not feel that you don't have enough. 

Part of the problem with any theory about speculating that the prices might go up without correcting is that in the real world, we end up having various corrections at various points, yet without any expectations that the BTC price will go up and them come back down to the price that we had sold some BTC along the way, so from my point of view, the mere fact that the BTC price tends to correct, that still does not mean that BTC sales on the way up (if they are authorized should be made in such a way that there is any expectation to be able to buy back the sold BTC at lower prices.


I am going to mostly focus on your 3rd point and your final sentence.   The point that I was making is to attempt to make sure that you have enough and to know the limits regarding your own withdrawal system, so if you know that you need a minimum amount to survive, then you should be able to figure out what you might do during those periods in which the BTC price might be down for extended periods of time. I personally suggest to start to temper your BTC withdrawal amounts once the BTC price gets lower than 25% higher than the 200-WMA, so surely historically the BTC price had not historically stayed below the 200-WMA  for long periods of time, but it is not unrealistic for such things to happen, and so you might want to decide if you have other sources to draw from during the times in which the BTC price is low, or maybe you have already figured out that you are still able to meet your regular expenses, even if you are employing a lower withdrawal rate for 1-2 years (if BTC prices were to stay down near or below the 200-WMA for that long).  See my sustainable withdrawal ideas.