⭐ Merited by JayJuanGee (1)
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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.
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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.
Well, I am kind of surprised that you have no experience with it, but surely there are many wallets I have no experience with despite being a bitcoiner for a very long time. But electrum is very easy to handle, open source, allows you to do all the basic stuff and some advanced stuff as well.
There is one thing I should mention here about the electrum wallet (and probably applies to all the other wallets): the automatic fee calculation can be very problematic in times of high volatility/transaction fee volatility. That is why I prefer to click the advanced fee determination mode and choose one by myself. I have learnt here in the forum that Jochen Hoenicke did a great job providing insights into ongoing transaction volume in real time. Now this would probably be a bit too much asked from someone who prefers to be as low key as possible in handling their BTC funds, but it can't hurt to deal with it whenever there is time and motivation.
The electrum wallet sometimes suggests a fee that may have been appropriate ten minutes ago to get it through relatively quickly. But it can be off very very much! Like very much! But I have seen this with some other wallets, too. That is why the website I provided above does at least allow you to do your analysis and make your own call as to how long a transaction most likely needs to be processed and what the fee is that you are willing to pay for that respective time frame.
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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.
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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..
Yes but I think that those who use their mobile devices for literally everything, checking their instagram, doing their online banking, managing their BTC, signing contracts, doing whatever with it, are probably the most vulnerable sources for attacks.
Anyone wanting to buy bitcoin on shorter than 4 year timelines would be trading rather than investing, and personally I consider bitcoin to be an investment rather than a trade
...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."
And there is one major misconception that I think a lot of people still suffer from. They compare bitcoin's performance to bitcoin's performance from various time frames. (By the way, I have never asked myself why time frame is two words and timeline is one word, but google quickly let me know that it's quite complicated
) But instead they should stick to opportunity cost, which only makes sense when you compare two different assets or decisions. I either buy bitcoin or something else, or I decide to buy bitcoin or nothing. But as long as bitcoin is more promising than any other asset and the alternative to not buy anything at all, I should buy bitcoin.
People seem to be stuck on the idea that because bitcoin has made thousands and thousands of percentage points growing in value, it is not as a good an investment as it used to be. But they forget that those who benefitted from those gains took a higher risk as it didn't stand the test of time yet, they have been early to the party and gathered knowledge that others either weren't able to or didn't bother to gather, etc. Several more reasons. But I know quite some people who say that bitcoin was so amazing because it went 10x, 100x, and now it might only go 3x in the next 2 years and they understand they missed the boat. This begs the question: what other asset could give you 3x in such a short period of time? So, they compare bitcoin to bitcoin and in my opinion that's utterly wrong. They can compare bitcoin to any other asset, or bitcoin to doing nothing at all. But saying that bitcoin won't perform as well as it did in the last 1.5 decades and therefore they don't buy is obviously illogical.
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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.
Yes, I know that you are rightfully not the guy who says this is the 100% bet everyone in life has been waiting for. Nothing is 100% and this is why I mentioned technological advancements whose consequences I simply cannot grasp. But most of the core values that bitcoin represents and protects seem to be best preserved in the hands of the bitcoin network. I can't yet see how this should be any different in the near future. And the larger the value of the network becomes, the higher is the incentive for the people involved to keep it updated and strengthened in order to make it robust enough to not fight against, but grow along with technological advancements.