By the way this is Part two of my above post, and this was the first time that the forum did not allow me to post because the error message said that my post had exceeded a 64,000 character limit.. hahahahaha..

Accordingly, this is the first time that I have been forced to split my post into two parts based on such a character limit.  I am not sure if the forum changed posting rules or if this had been the first time that any of my forum posts had exceeded such 64k character limit.    To avoid my sequential posts, I was going to wait until some other member were to post before posting this part two post, but you guys are too damned slow.. so I just decided to post anyhow nearly four hours between posts.. .


Personally, I think that it is a BIG waste of time to be fucking around with simulators or learning to trade (or invest) in bitcoin without using real bitcoin.

Sure, I am not opposed to learning through various kinds of tools, yet I still think that people should be albe to figure out ways to learn by using real bitcoin, and perhaps liming their budget if they are going to try to trade with some of their BTC holdings... Yeah, it is a slippery slope, so people do have to learn how to control their own emotions and not get too greedy, yet from my point of view it is better to use real money rather than using fake money.

So let's say for example, a person has a real limited budget that he is ONLY able to invest $10 per week, so it is going to take him a whole year to get his investment up to $520.  If he cannot figure out ways to increase his discretionary income, then sure maybe a guy like that might end up using some kind of fake money to learn, since maybe he might need to get his investment size up to $1k or so in order to be able to allocate $100 towards trading... so there could be some times in which simulation might be helpful, even though it seems to me that anyone who has really low income needs to figure out ways to try to increase his discretionary income by increasing his income and/or cutting his expenses, but yeah, if there are very limited opportunties to increase discretionary income, then in those kinds of circumstances simulated trading might be acceptable, even though surely using real money is going to be the better of teachers... and people should be attempting to try to figure out ways in which they conserve and/or build their investment portfolio and do not take unnecessary risks, and even though there are quite a few people who suck in those kinds of basic skills since there are so many people who get lured into gambling techniques, I also think that people should be able to learn how to conserve their own money and don't be devolving into gambling techniques, and I personally think that they are better off to be using real money when they employ their various practices in order to try to be real about what they are doing.. even tough there can be some limited ways to use some of the fake money trading (investing) as learning tools.. while at the same time, trying to relate any investing and/or trading to real world applications.. even if a person might ONLY have $10 per week to be investing into bitcoin, there should be some practicality that the amount of the investment has to get to a certain large enough size (such as $1k or more) before maybe up to 10% might be potentially available to be used for learning about trading (if the person cannot resist the temptation to spend time money and energies to learn about it).


These are all good points.


For sure it is a bit problematic that so many folks end up assigning way higher values to BTC price direction movements based on squiggly lines, and even if the squiggly liines might cause a greater than 50% chance that the BTC price moves in accordance with the squiggly line projections, people still will end up taking positions that end up assigning way more probabiility than the line justifies, so in the long run, even if some of these guys are getting 9 out of 10 of their guesses correct, the way they end up putting their predictions into practice, it may well take only 1 or 2 wrong guesses in order to wipe out all of the profits that they had made from the previous 9 guesses.. .so then they might end up in a no better position than they would have been in by just buying and/or holding, but more likely they end up in a worse position than they would have by just buying and holding, especially if we play this out over years and years and years, and especially something like 5-12 years of being involved in something like bitcoin.. but yeah, so many of them still present their ideas as if they are smarter than everyone else, so surely they might be smart and they might even have a pretty high success rate, yet thy might not admit that their overall approach is not very likely to actually beat a buy and hold strategy, especially over a longer period of time such as 5-12 years.


These are not comparative examples, since many of us already likely realize that the long term accumulators, even if they end up making several large purchases at or towards the top, the longer term BTC accumulators are way more likely to be faring better than those who are fucking around with various kinds of trading...and sure there might be a few BTC traders who do better than the longer term accumulators, yet they are quite likely a pretty damn small percentage, probably less than 5-10% of the traders who are in fact able to beat a buy and hold strategy, whether in bitcoin or anything else for that matter... (especially over  5-12 years or longer) but here we are talking about bitcoin, which happens to be amongst the best, if not the best of long term investments (pristine assets), so why fuck around with trying to trade an asset that is pretty damned close to pristine even if is ongoing price performance is not guaranteed to be pristine? Yes.. the doubters likely assign to high of probabilities to bitcoin going to zero or various downside BTC price scenarios, which sure those going to zero and downside scenarios are not zero probabilities, but many bitcoin naysayers spend way too much time choosing not to invest into (or to way underinvest in) bitcoin based on overly assigning to negative scenarios and/or failing to get off zero based on upside scenarios.. and even better allocations of 5% to 25% into bitcoin, which would be better self-interested approaches to bitcoin, so we have so many (probably an overwhelming majority of the world's population) taking little to no stake into bitcoin.


You seem to be referring to a person who invests beyond his discretionary income. Surely folks have to figure out how to invest into bitcoin without going past their discretionary income, so they can be aggressive, but they still have to account for their money being tied up for 4-10 years or longer and/or even the possibility that they could lose 100% of their investment into bitcoin, so if they are investing with other expectations, then they may well be investing beyond their discretionary income (and with funds that they actually need).. so yeah each of us has to attempt to find a balance in our investment to be as aggressive as we are able to be, but we still have to stay alive, so sometimes it is better to cut back on our bitcoin investment levels so that we do not invest into bitcoin with amounts of money that we are not willing, ready and able to lose... and yeah, my mere proclamation that we might lose 100% of our investment, that does not mean that we are intending to lose any of our investment, even though we need to be financially and mentally prepared for such possibility to be able to hold for 4-10 years or longer for any amount of value that we choose to invest into bitcoin.


I might be arguing with you about semantics I_Anime, yet I would suggest that reserve funds and float would be the money that is used for taking care of fluctuations in monthly cashflow (and expenses) rather than emergency funds.  In my thinking, you should never get to a position of having to touch or tap into your emergency funds unless there is an actual emergency, and if you set up your finances in solid ways, then your odds of actually having to tap into emergency funds should be pretty damned close to zero absent some kind of an actual emergency...so you might be investing for 20-30 years and never have to tap into your emergency funds, and surely the more and more that you build your wealth and your finances, then it should become more and more likely that that you have a variety of places that you would draw from before you even get close to being in such a state that you ONLY have to tap into your emergency funds.. and yeah, the rich have more options than the poor, so it surely could take 4-10 years or longer just to build your investment portfolio and your various cash reserves up to a position that you are really starting to feel secure in the various cash options that you have available to you, and so both poor people and people who are in the earliest of stages of building up their bitcoin investment (and their back up funds) are in the most jeopardy to screw things up, so it can take time to really get used to really making sure that you are both building your investment (presumptively into bitcoin) and your various back up funds so that you are really in a solid cashflow management position, feeling empowered by that and even feeling empowered that you have struck a comfortable balance between working capital (presumptively bitcoin) and non-working capital (cash - that is still working in a more subliminal way as compared to the bitcoin since it is still necessary to have especially during your early wealth building years).  


From my perspective, you have reached and applied a strange definition of gambling.  I agree that a gambler might not have very good knowledge, so they might not understand or appreciate the level of risk that they are taking.  However, I doubt that a criteria of gambling is that you are losing money.. because an investment and/or a prudent trader could also lose money.. even though most likely a gambler is more likely to lose money, I doubt the mere fact that you are losing money is a material differentiator in regards to what is gambling versus what is not gambling... I think that more traditional ideas of gambling is when you are playing games that are more about chance rather than skill.. so the more chance that is involved, then the more it is on the gambling side of the spectrum and the more skill that is involved, then the less it is on the gambling side of the spectrum, and at the same time, sometimes, any of us could end up miscalculating or mismeasuring what is chance and what is skill.


For sure, I find this kind of "guarantee" framing of bitcoin to be problematic, and I doubt that you have to proclaim that bitcoin is guaranteed to be profitable in order to assess that long-term investing in bitcoin is not gambling and is not as much of a game of chance as compared with trading and/or gambling.

I think that even acknowledging that bitcoin is an asymmetric bet to the upside in which the most that you can lose is 100%, the underlying facts about bitcoin that support that kind of a "asymmetric bet" conclusory framework surely would be enough to conclude that bitcoin falls more into a category of skill rather than luck, even though I used the term "bet" within my description of why a person would be advantaged by investing into bitcoin versus not investing into it.


Yeah, you reach the same lame parameter as Dzwaafu11 based on your presumption that gambling loses money and investing does not.  That is surely not a correct assessment of what differentiates gambling from investing.


Your conclusion that gambling involves taking high risk is likely a fair assessment, , but that still would take us back to assessing gambling to be more about the employment  of chance rather than the employment of skill.  Surely trading may or may not employ skill versus chance, and the same is true for investing, there are ways that investing can also end up falling in the category of chance rather than skill if it were to be practiced in too much of a sloppy way in terms of what asset is chosen or perhaps the level of aggressiveness in regards to accumulating the asset (whether bitcoin or some other asset that is considered to be an investment).


You are going down a strange path if you are trying to suggest that traders turn into investors based on their being in profits, and I am not even suggesting that there might not be overlap in the categories, yet it still seems misleading to fit traders into an investment category merely because they are in profits or even that they are able to sustain long term profits.

Surely there are a lot of traders that convolute the idea of trading and try to act like they are investors, and there can also be different kinds of ways which we might separate the traders from investors based on the kind of asset that they are into, so frequently context will matter, including that something like bitcoin does seem to require at least a 4 year timeline to be considered an investor rather than a trader, but surely there are some folks who still come to bitcoin with a trading kind of a mindset, but they are wanting to play a longer kind of a play, such as more than 4 years, so the categories are not always completely clear, and some folks will also consider themselves as investors with less than a 4-year timeline, and they are wanting to play the wave, which surely seems like a trader or a gambler, even if they might have decent odds of being able to identify up and down periods of bitcoin that still might fall within the uses of historical 4-year cycles that have existed in bitcoin (at least so far). So the mere fact that they might be able to play the waves in bitcoin might not justify calling them an investor, even if they refer to themselves as investors, so we might not always agree on definitions in regards to who are the investors and who are the traders.