I have mentioned several times that traditional financial systems allow for a 4%-ish annual withdrawal rate, which means that you have to have 25 years worth of your income/expenses saved up before you are able to completely live off of those traditional investments in a kind of perpetual way... .and so these are ways not to deplete your principle until it comes to a time that you might see that you ONLY have a few years left (to the extent that you might foresee your demise and then start to deplete your principle at that time.
With 4% annual withdrawal, you will die will all your life savings intact. This is too conservative imo.
I have lived all my life in accumulation phase with zero withdrawals.. However, I have reached a point where i already changed to another job which I am working less , but i accumulate less as well. But I am close to decide to move to a withdrawal phase. Finally FIRE.
Most of that thanks to bitcoin .
I am engaging in different approaches now to spend money. It is hard to spend money (not just in bullshit like poker player said).
But it is hard to plan good trips, shows to go, etc.. things to buy that I really need etc because I won't die with my savings intact.
I agree that it is quite likely that the bitcoin stash will continue to grow, even with a 4% withdrawal rate, yet sometimes folks can become a bit concerned about whether they have enough of an investment stash to sustain themselves from the income (or the value preservation) of their investment stash, once they have already pulled the fuck you lever.
It seems to me that many people are conservative because they don't want to overly spend from their principle, until such a time that they are ready, so they might even keep some additional amounts of principle just to have insurance for unexpected events (expenses) that might end up coming in their direction, and perhaps I am somewhat concerned about your assumption that we cannot accomplish both things - such as being able to live quite well, and still be able to hold principle in tact.. and maybe it could be that if we spend several years living in a FIRE kind of a way, and if our investment is still growing, then we may well find it justifiable to increase our spending amount, whether we make incremental upwards adjustment in our withdrawal amounts (I am a pretty BIG fan of incrementalistic changes) or if we might decide that we can make some BIG purchases in order to bring out overall portfolio size down to less of an overly abundance level.
Each of us is in charge of figuring how what rises to the level of abundance or over abundance and the extent to which we might want to shave our investment portfolio size down.
I will say that I know people who live quite well, and they have multiples (if not magnitudes) more than the amount that they need for completely living off of the income from their investments, so surely there sometimes could be challenges to figure out what kinds of ways to spend more money, and I am not necessarily going to blame them for doing something wrong merely because they have wealth levels that go way beyond their income needs (or lifestyle needs). It seems that holding a decent amount of value in bitcoin can contribute to such actual overabundance, since many of us may well employ conservative spending styles in accordance with traditional investment portfolio management, but then find that our bitcoin holdings are appreciating in value way faster than we are able to spend it.