Sure, there are some folks who do not have enough discipline to follow what they have authorized themselves to do, yet that likely has more to do with their inability to know where they are at in regards to whether they are still accumulating bitcoin or not.

Yes, it can be quite tempting for guys in their first 4-8 years of building their bitcoin investment to get tempted by profits, and to lose track of their still being in accumulation stages.

so yeah, many folks will cash out of their investments too soon since they end up having so much value in their investments, and they are relatively poor, so they get so tempted to dip into something that might be several times in profits, yet they also might not realize that they are suffering very decently good odds of prematurely depleting their holdings and losing out on future compounding of the value.  They may even imagine that they can buy back later (maybe even cheaper), and so yeah, they end up consuming their cashed out amount, and they end up not replacing it.. In the end, they end up with a fraction of the bitcoin that they could have had, if they had exercised more discipline.

The replacement portion of spend and replace should be done within a few days and maybe a week or two at most. Otherwise there may be attempts at trading rather than spending and replacing.

When I was in my bitcoin accumulation phase that I mostly got through it within a year in 2014, yet I continued to accumulate bitcoin for at least a few years through early 2017, and during those times, whenever I did spend and replace, I would usually buy back 20% or more bitcoin than I had sold.   So for example, if I spent $100 worth of bitcoin (and I even had some gifts that I would make in bitcoin in my early days of bitcoin), then I might buy back a minimum of $120 worth of bitcoin or maybe even I might buy back $200 worth of bitcoin, just to be sure that I was ongoingly growing rather than depleting my BTC stash. 

Let's say that we were in 2015 and the BTC price was around $250, and so maybe I bought some product for $50, and then I gave away 5 gifts of $50 each.  So that amounted to me selling and/or giving away around $100 worth of value that would be 0.4 BTC.  Even though minimally, I might want to make sure that I buy back the 0.4 BTC, I might decide to buy back 0.6 BTC which would end up costing me around $150.  Sure, there could be times in which I was able to buy back the BTC that I had spent for cheaper, yet since I was in accumulation mode, I tended to not concern myself with price and I would tend to worry about trying to play trading kinds of games, so within a few days of my spend, I would generally have had already bought back the BTC and plus a bit more when the time was convenient to carry out the buying back. 

There can be times in which we want to spend bitcoin in order to support the bitcoin infrastructure or maybe we want to set up lightning network wallets or engage in other kinds of bitcoin transactions that end up costing transaction fees, and I don't see anything wrong with spending bitcoin and replacing that bitcoin and maintaining our focus on making sure that we are either maintaining or growing our BTC holdings, especially during periods that we consider ourselves to be in our BTC accumulation phase - which could take 1-2 cycles to really build up our bitcoin holdings (our BTC stack size).


Surely it is better to dip into your emergency fund to resolve finances than to dip into your bitcoin, yet if a person finds himself dipping into his emergency funds in non-emergency situations, then he is likely doing something wrong in his cashflow management by either miscalculating his discretionary income (as you mentioned) or otherwise not holding enough reserve and/or float funds in order to be able to resolve any of his monthly expenses in between his receipt of income. 

Each of us should be able to get better at our various cashflow management practices, yet it still might take us a long time to get our emergency fund up to a minimum of 3 months and then to figure out what other levels of back up funds that we might need to keep, and if we have inconsistent and erratic income and/or inconsistent and erratic expenses, then we are likely going to need to be in the practice of holding more reserve funds, since emergency funds should not be used for foreseeable circumstances and foreseeable irregularities.  If we already know that our income/expenses are erratic, then if it happens that we don't have enough income to cover our expenses, then we would have already known that situation could have had been coming, and that money should not have to come from emergency funds to resolve the situation... yet if we ran out of all funds, and all we have left to spend is our emergency funds and our bitcoin investment, then surely it is better to spend from our emergency funds prior to spending from our bitcoin investments.. and at the same time, working to replace our spent emergency funds as soon as practicable.


I doubt that it matters whether we believe that the BTC price might be running away soon or not.  We still should not be in the practice of using our emergency funds to buy bitcoin, since buying bitcoin is not an emergency.  Sure, if we have other funds that are set aside for buying bitcoin or buying during dips, then no problem, we can use that money to buy more bitcoin.  Otherwise, if we are largely in our early stages of accumulating bitcoin, perhaps even in our first cycle of buying bitcoin, we should not be allowing the bitcoin price or our perception of the BTC price to be jeopardizing our cashflow management practices and/or dipping into our emergency funds.