It seems to me that most people should be considering bitcoin as an investment that is 4-10 years or longer, and the only reason to be thinking about less than 10 years is if you have age and/or health particulars that prevent you from being able to project your bitcoin investment in a longer timeline... .. so if we might presume that you are not fitting in the category of elderly or enfirmed, then we should presume your timeline to be 10 years or longer...
I have found out that long term holders are the ones that are making the most profits from Bitcoin because of the patience to hold for couples of years as the price of Bitcoin keeps hitting more Xs gradually. Holding Bitcoin can even be more profitable than trading it because in trading, you can make a profit of $5k this month and by next month you could be lossing $8k because of the uncertainty in the crypto market. But when you are holding Bitcoin, even though price keepa going down, you will see it as an opportunity to buy more bags rather than complaining of your crypto portfolio value reducing. Holding patiently is a great virtue!
So you don't have to rush your investment. You can try to invest as aggressively as you are able to without overdoing it, yet if you do not have back up funds, you need to be trying to build them up at the same time that you are building up your bitcoin investment. Once you get your emergency funds up to 3 months (and then maybe you would have 3 months in bitcoin too), then you may be able to start to become even more aggressive in your bitcoin investment, yet you also have to consider that you don't even want to be tapping into your emergency funds, so you also might have to make sure that you build another month or two or more of various kinds of back up funds. I am not claiming to know your particulars, but each of us has to have these kinds of back up funds so that we are not forced to sell out of any of our BTC and we are not contributing to our own creation of emergencies in situations that no emergency should exist if we had engaged in better preparations. So it could be the case that you might need 5 months or more of back up funds (that includes your 3 months of emergency funds) before you are really able to become more aggressive in your approach to your bitcoin investment.
I have some backup funds scattered in fiat so in case of any emergency bills, I can attend to it asap without any panic.
Experience is the best teacher and I've learnt the hard way and I hope that other investors whether short term or long term would make sure they have a backup funds to take care of any emergency that ever comes their way. As I am investing in Bitcoin, I am also making sure that I invest in physical business so the profits I'm getting from the business can be used to grow other businesses and as back up funds.
Yep. If you are using money that you know that you are going to need, even a few months down the road, then you are trading (gambling) rather than investing, and any of us can make mistakes to take chances with our expenses and then we end up making mistakes. I have made those kinds of mistakes on more than one occasion, yet we we see that the mistakes tend to have greater repercussions than if we had followed better practices, then we realize that we have to figure out ways to make sure that we are not engaging in behaviors that increase the chances that we are going to end up having to suffer through those kinds of repercussions.
In other words, we have to try to make sure that we are not gambling with our investment, and we are truly using money that we do not need to make our bitcoin investments. It can take a while to build up these kinds of better practices, and sure sometimes we are going to feel that we have too much cash sitting around and not doing anything, yet after we have experienced some of the difficulties we will also come to realize that even cash sitting around is serving a purpose, and we should be able to become more and more comfortable with our chosen balance, which means that we are getting better and better at managing our cashflow balances.
To be frank, there are lots of people that tend to invest their money in Bitcoin without knowing that they are indirectly gambling with their investments. Just imagine trying to use a little amount of capital, let's say $100 to make $30k because there are rumors that some people, maybe traders are investing in new projects that is giving them huge profits, maybe as high as $10k from a single crypto projects.
Newbies are the ones that do fall for these kind trap. Instead of them to invest in Bitcoin and keep holding their Bitcoin portfolio even though it's not as much as we think, some would want to make huge profits from the crypto market by invest in memecoins instead of Bitcoin where they have have full relaxation that their invest is safe and secure from rug pulls. Trading is a form of gambling but from a different perspective. A trader can not always be in profit but an investor can always be on profit especially holding great asset like Bitcoin without selling your portfolio even when the price of Bitcoin is down.
Surely it tends to be a much better feeling when our bitcoin holdings are in profits as compared to when they are not in profits, so there can be degrees of bad management, and the worst would be selling at a loss, and surely it is not as bad to sell at a profit, yet it is still not good BTC portfolio management to be selling your investment merely because you are either engaging in poor cashflow management or you are tempted to tap into your bitcoin investment at a time that is way before your 10 years or more investment timeline.
Another value of holding onto your bitcoin investment for a long time is that its value continues to compound upon itself, so instead of getting profits that are less than one doubling, you may well end up getting several doublings, and the doublings really compound upon themselves.
In one of my earlier posts I outline 9-ish doubling from 2015 to present, which also shows that each doubling becomes more powerful resulting in 256x in profits or maybe even 512x in profits after the next doubling. If you continuously take money out, you end up missing out on the compounding events that are not guaranteed but still bitcoin has not really weakened in the strength in its investment thesis over the past 10-ish years, even if some of the upside potential is not as exponential.
So, let's look at the historical numbers and the timeline from 2015 to present again.
0) $250 (2015) 1X
1) $500 (2015-2016) 2X
2) $1,000 (2016-2017) 2X * 2 = 4X
3) $2,000 (2017) 4X * 2 = 8X
4) $4,000 (2017-2020) 8X * 2 = 16X
5) $8,000 (2017-2020) 16X * 2 = 32X
6) $16,000 (2017-2022) 32X * 2 = 64X
7) $32,000 (2021-2023?) 64X * 2 = 128X
8 ) $64,000 (2021-?) 128X * 2 = 256X
9) $128,000 (?) 256X * 2 = 512X
Bitcoin has really appreciated from nothing to a great project many firms and whales are looking ahead to accumulate for a lifestime profitability. For Bitcoin to have 512X since 2015, it means that the future is bright and Bitcoin could hit more worth as the adoption keeps increasing. It means that if we start counting how many x Bitcoin has reach from 2010, it could exceed 2000x from the beginning.