I thought that I was saying something a bit different, which is the most important thing is knowing your own personal financial and psychological situation.  I know that I did not say it exactly like that, but knowing your own finances and disposable income is more important than knowing much of anything about bitcoin, beyond just having some sense that bitcoin is number go up technology... so in that regard, you would be anticipating to invest into bitcoin for 4-10 years or longer.  In the very beginning, you might not even be 100% sure that you want to be an investor rather than a trader, so you might not even be completely willing to commit  to a 4-10 year or more timeline, yet it seems that the less you know the less aggressive you are going to be in your investment amount and so there would be value to continue to learn about bitcoin while you are investing so that you are able to feel comfortable becoming more aggressive about it and solidifying your commitment to a 4-10 year or longer investment timeline.

I probably could have had said this more clearly, yet maybe the idea is not really an easy one to grasp, because we all know that it is good to have knowledge about things that we are involved in in order to have better commitment to our involvement, yet at the same time it still is the case that we really don't need to know very much at bitcoin in the very beginning, yet we will not be able to be very aggressive in our investing into it until we learn more about it, but we can still get started, perhaps in a somewhat whimpy way until we learn enough to feel more committed. 

I kind of presume that an overwhelming majority of people know whether they have disposable income or not, even though I also presume that a lot of people might not be very good at managing their particulars but they still might be in the habit of having a bit of a cashflow cushion of something like 2-4 weeks (and maybe even more) of their expenses just in case they need more or in case they miscalculate their exact monthly expenses.  One of the tricky aspects when it comes to actually investing into something like bitcoin versus having savings or even investing into housing or into their retirement account is that with bitcoin there may be a sense that they are able to get in and out whenever they like (which can devolve into thinking of bitcoin as something that can be traded rather than invested) and also couple that with the extreme volatility that bitcoin can sometimes have, then they might be tempted to get in and out of bitcoin based on its volatility and also based on their own lack of a tendency to pre-establish a sufficient financial cushion, so they would need to develop certain skills, practices and mindsets in regards to investing into bitcoin, even though they don't need to have any of those skills practices and mindset at the very beginning of getting started, yet in order to be able to commit to 4-10 years or longer, they likely would need to develop those kinds of skills, practices and mindsets in order to be able to commit to investing into bitcoin (rather than devolving into some kind of an inclination to trade it).


I agree the longer the better, but there are some folks who are not able to commit to 10 years based on age, health considerations or some other complications in their own living situation, so I would hate to suggest that the minimum investment timeline is 10 years rather than 4 years - even though I agree that less than 4 years is trading and/or gambling rather than investing, even though many of us still realize that there are pretty decent odds that a less than 4 year timeline could still have decently good chances to be traded successfully with fiat profits (Personally, I don't recommend trading bitcoin, though I know that people can do it and do do it successfully, yet a trading mindset seems to be the wrong one when it comes to bitcoin.. but how can you stop people from their inclinations?  whether it works out for them or not might be another story since if they keep engaging in that kind of behavior they increase their chances of putting themselves in a worse position as compared with the long term bitcoin investor who has historically ended up with pretty decent results, especially the longer the timeline that he had been accumulating BTC through buying and/or holding)


No argument from me about these points.


I had meant to say something like that in the initial paragraph of my response, largely in terms of the size of the investment would likely affect self-custody considerations, so of course, the larger the investment the more likely that some of it, if not all of it might be considered to put into self-custody, and surely risks are being taken when held in third party custody, yet if someone is just starting to invest or is only investing $10 per week it could take several months before they even reach an amount that self-custody would be necessary and/or even practical.


I should probably practice with electrum so that I might be able to recommend it.  I still doubt that it is necessary to learn about self-custody to get started, and also I frequently suggest that guys should not be creating small UTXOs. Yet sometimes we might need to practice with small UTXOs, especially now onchain transaction fees are fairly reasonable.


Social engineering and various other kinds of spoofing can be problematic for a lot of folks to get into some issue in which their devices are getting attacked or even that they sometimes don't know enough to keep themselves from giving away their coins or otherwise making their keys vulnerable  A lot of people do not even have computers, so they are completely working from mobile devices..


Even if we have a longer investment timeline of 10 years or longer, we can still reassess if our investment thesis into bitcoin has gotten weaker.  It seems that there are always various concerns, and sometimes we can adjust our exposure levels based on our assessments of various concerns that we might have, and even if we mostly consider ourselves to be locked into our investment, we still can reassess from time to time and sometimes have some changes to our allocation based on our concerns.. including that the longer we are in, the more flexibility that we should end up having, especially if most of our BTC holdings is mostly in profits including it could be in multiple or even magnitudes of profits.. like for me, right now I consider myself to be around 64x profits, but yeah in late 2018 it got down to ONLY around 3x to 5x of profits and then in late 2022 it got down to ONLY  being around 16x profits, and so surely there can be some preference to be in higher profits when shaving off any cornz, but at the same time, there can also be some lessening of the worries when the profits are getting into the higher levels.

Yeah, people who have been investing in the last 4-ish years, might still have average costs per BTC that are int he $20k to $40k region, so their profit levels might still not be very high, so they still might even be in their relatively early accumulation stages too, so their average cost per BTC may continue to go up since they are still ongoingly buying BTC, so sometimes it can take a bit of time before the costs per BTC might start to either flatten or maybe even start to go down if a person might consider that selling some of their BTC to bring down their costs per BTC.  There are various ways to account for "costs per BTC."


There seems to be little reason to conclude that bitcoin is going to stop going up in value and price, especially over timelines that are 4-10 years or longer, even if the degree of price appreciation might not be as great, it still seems like a solid place to keep value and to increase options.  It seems that many folks are still not allocated enough to bitcoin, and even for some of us who might consider that we have enough of an allocation to bitcoin, we still might consider that we don't necessarily want to sell too much too soon, so we still might be selling other assets rather than interacting with our BTC.. even if we might have some price-based or time based selling practices with our BTC that might allow us to sell some of our BTC from time to time based on some conditions that we have set for ourselves.


I like to consider the long term in bitcoin as having decently good odds of bringing more options rather than talking about future profits, since it seems to me that if we are narrowing in on profits, then we are likely getting into a trading rather than an investment mindset.. and also there can be ways that once we arrive down the road of 10 years or more in which we might be starting to engage in price based or time based withdrawals, we still might not be cashing out large portions of our holdings, but just cashing out some portions from time to time as we might need it and then otherwise mostly keeping value in our bitcoin investment and continuing to let it grow.. since we might have other sources of income and/or investments that we would spend from prior to spending from our BTC holdings... so even if we might no longer get income from working, we might have other sources of income, yet our bitcoin might supplement our other sources of income but it might not be our only place to spend from which we might purposefully choose to spend from our bitcoin as one of the last resources rather than the first, including considering if we might even put specific criteria for spending our bitcoin that could be limited based on BTC price moves and/or limitations based on passage of time.