⭐ Merited by tiCeR (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.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.
https://mempool.space/ is also good for estimating fees based on the fees that were being processed in previous blocks
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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....
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..Sometimes I am not sure what to say to people who do not have a computer, yet we should not expect that you have to own a computer to own bitcoin, yet maybe after a certain amount of bitcoin, it might be practical to also own some kind of a computer? There are air-gapped harware wallets that communicate via QR codes. Sometimes it can be difficult to make any recommendations beyond our own experiences, and there are ONLY so many hours in a day to get experiences, too.
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
...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."
) I am not sure if I use the terms timeline and time frame correctly, since it seems that sometimes I might say time line and/or timeframe.. but it does seem that ai mostly say timeline and time frame... but whatever, there might be a bit of an osmosis element in terms of just repeating how it had been previously remembered to have been seen... .going from memory, even though sometimes it does help to look up the words to appreciate if we are using them in a kind of understood way. Sometimes I also make up words, if the made up word seems to better describe what I am wanting to say.
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.
I understand that investment opportunities are going to vary for people, and sometimes people will take inferior investment paths because they take the path of least resistance.
If I take my own situation as an example. I am not sure if I would have had invested into bitcoin prior to when I got into it, partially based on how I was investing prior to 2013, which was largely investing into a 401k like asset that had employer matching and tax deferral, and I had also had times in which I was investing into business type stuff and property type stuff, so with the combination of those, I tended to have a minimum of investing 10% of my salary, yet sometimes I had periods of investing up to 30%, depending on what else I had going on and my abilities to accomplish that.
There are so many folks who struggle to even be able to save/invest 10% of their salary, so if they might be getting pretty close to 10% with their investment into the traditional assets, then they might have to be inspired to invest more in order to make sure that they have a bitcoin position, too. If they do not have very many other investment opportunties, then the case for bitcoin becomes easier, and for me, in late 2013, I was no longer eligible for my 401k option, so I became anxious to find some kind of a substitute that would be an equivalent or perhaps better, and I found bitcoin to fit that space very well, and so in that sense, I was even inspired to invest somewhat aggressively into bitcoin (and with some regularity) with a tentative goal of perhaps being able to meet the size of my previous investments into my 401k within 10-15 years... So I thought that if my ongoing investment into bitcoin was to be able to be the same size as my 401k in 10-15 years, then I would have had largely done as good as expected in terms of being able to supplement or complement that 401k.
Spoil alert is that even though my BTC investment largely underperformed expectations for around 2.5 years, it largely ended up making up for lost ground in late 2016 and thereafter, so even in mid-2017, it was getting close to matching the size of my 401k.....so surely I ended up making adjustments in my timeline expectations based on BTC's performance, including that not really being able to completely have confidence in regards to the ongoing volatility, yet being able to retain enough conviction to continue to hold it through the later 2018 downturn and our thereafter volatile price movements... and so some of the conviction also likely end s up coming from ongoing studying of bitcoin, yet still figuring out if there might be some additional confidence by pulling some value out of bitcoin, too... since once any of us has enough in bitcoin or maybe more than enough we can either start to divert our investments into other areas or maybe we might even take some value out of bitcoin from time to time, whether periodic price-based withdrawals or periodic time-based withdrawals.
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.
Surely, the earlier that any of us came to bitcoin there were uncertainties, and there were quite a few who got purged out, and so in the end, each of those of us who stayed in bitcoin had to still figure out our position size and how aggressive that we were able to feel comfort in being... so yeah, there ended up being decently sized upside, and the downside was always there, yet at the same time, right now it seems that bitcoin's investment thesis is stronger with less upside and even less risk of downside, while at the same time, we do still seem to be in the early days of bitcoin's adoption, even though always after various BTC price runs there are so many trying to pigeon-hole bitcoin into "mature" asset territories, and sure bitcoin continues to become more and more mature, yet I have my doubts when anyone is trying to proclaim that bitcoin's glory days are gone.
Yeah, sure you would have had been better off to buy bitcoin yesterday, but we cannot turn back the clock, so each of us needs to decide from today in regards to future potential, and it seems to me that bitcoin still is amongst the best (if not the best) of investments currently available, even if its upside is likely less exponential as historically it has been.
Even with myself, there surely were ways that I could have had average costs per BTC in the $200 to $800 price ranges, yet instead my current costs per BTC are right around $1k per BTC, so yeah, assertions can be made that "mistakes were made," which would not be untrue, and it is likely that any of us are not going to get the most BTC and the cheapest possible prices. We are going to have to do as best as we can and see where that gets us 10-15 years down the road, and those guys who continue to refuse to take action are likely ongoingly prejudiced by their failure/refusal to take actions,
since even the guy who started investing $100 per week into bitcoin four years ago and who went through two price tops in 2021, he is still going to be way better off for having had started earlier rather than waiting and not being able to show progress with that $100 per week, since over the past 4 years he would have had invested near $21k and he would have accumulated nearly 0.65 BTC, which surely would put him in quite a decent place, and his place would be even better if he would have had invested more, but guys can ONLY do as much as they can and the passage of time is going to tend to be their friend. So the longer that we go back, the better our results are going to end up being, even if our investment was not necessarily a high amount of weekly amount, it can still add up with the passage of time.
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?
People get overly greedy, and I recall having all kinds of debates with shitcoiners in 2017 in regards to supposedly how bitcoin was so limited in its upside potential as compared with various shitcoins, and it seems that history is likely to repeat itself for those who get distracted into shitcoins, and sure it could be true that bitcoin might ONLY get 3x from here.. but many of us likely realize that bitcoin is also around 1,000x better than gold, which is 20,000x from here, but still it could take 50-200 years for bitcoin to go up that much, and surely many of us do not likely have 50-200 year investment time horizons, yet still we should be able to appreciate that bitcoin still has decently good upside potential as compared with other kinds of alternative investment choices, and we need to consider both upside and downside potential in order to really figure out where to invest, how to invest and how much to allocate to bitcoin as compared with other places that we might choose to place our time, energies and value.
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.
Yep. We cannot go back, but sure we can see how the comparison of bitcoin to bitcoin likely ends up in a futile search for the next bitcoin rather than appreciating bitcoin for what it is, even if some of the upside potential has been taking out from being a later adopter.
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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.Various network effect do seem to continue to grow.. which continues to have affects on UPward pressures on BTC prices wether we just refer them as Metcalfe type growths or even refer to the 7 network effects that were outlined by Trace Mayer.