Most people have the most basic skills to get started investing into bitcoin, yet at the same time, no one really wants to get into an investment and lose money, and so bitcoin is a very good investment as long as the person has a 4-10 year or longer investment time horizon, which will help them in terms of not focusing on getting rich quickly, but instead building cashflow management systems that help to keep them in the game, 4-10 years or longer down the road they will still be in the game and they maybe are tweaking their systems along the way to keep building, perhaps even being aggressive, while at the same time making sure that they are not going overboard in terms of making sure that they not only stay within the bounds of their discretionary income but also making sure that psychologically they are not investing money that they cannot afford to lose, psychologically... ...

so for example, we might have a person who finds out about bitcoin and just on the surface, they know that they have enough money to invest into bitcoin at a rate of $100 per week, yet on purpose they start out with $35 per week, and they figure out their 9 individual factors.. and sure maybe after a few weeks or months they are able to increase their investment into bitcoin because they also figure out better their cashflow management systems and they start to put their systems into practice. .and some folks will be faster learners than others and with more experiences than others, while at the same time, they may even figure out ways that they are able to increase their discretionary income (by increasing their income and/or by cutting their expenses), which after several months they might even get up to investing $100 per week and maybe even more than $100 per week based on their both increasing their discretionary income and by improving their cashflow management systems.

So establishing position size can do a lot to address fear and respond to perceptions of risk, and if we realize that we can lose most or all of our investment due to either execution risks and/or due to risks of the asset, then at the same time, we can make sure that we are not investing beyond our competency and/or our level of knowledge, but that self-imposed limitation does not mean that we stay on zero, wait or study the matter, but instead we get the fuck started as soon as possible, but we adjust our weekly BTC purchase amount down to a level that is comfortable for our own finances and psychology, and then as we learn and we get more comfortable, we can slowly ramp up our weekly investment amount and/or any other ways that we might consider investing into bitcoin such as lump sum and/or buying on dips... to the extent that we might either realize that we have other funds that could go into bitcoin or that from time to time, we might realize that we have extra cashflows or other extra discretionary income that could be considered to be placed into bitcoin as compared with places that we would have previously (before our starting with bitcoin) would have had considered to be appropriate places to put our extra money.


Yep.  Even if a person might not take self custody of his bitcoin in his first 3-6 months of investing into bitcoin, self-custody should be something that he learns and prioritizes, even if he might just target 70-90% of his bitcoin as his self-custody stash.

Some guys believe that self-custody needs to be learned right away, yet personally, I think getting started, figuring out discretionary income and cashflow management are higher priorities than self-custody, yet at the same time, the power of bitcoin comes from self custody and not holding it on exchanges, even though surely there is a learning curve to self custody, and some self-custody solutions are easier to learn than others, yet the self-custody area and types of software, wallets and/or services are ongoingly evolving...

so finding a suitable solution is a moving target too that likely more security needs to be established the larger our Bitcoin stash gets or maybe the larger that bitcoin may well become a higher portion of a person's networth, so then they may well have to give more considerations to how they are holding their coins in terms of convenience, usability, economic efficiency, liquidity (and being able to move coins around if necessary), privacy, security and maybe even anonymity in regards to aspects of their stash.... so they might figure out systems to divide their stash into various parts with differing kinds of holdings for different parts of their stash.. and these are not likely learned early in the bitcoin investment journey  - unless you might be some kind of a technical genius nerd type.. which is not a bad thing but not everyone has high technical skills and even some of the high technical skill guys screw up their bitcoin custody.


In some sense both of you are wrong, because describing bitcoin as risky or not risky is problematic, since there are things that we can do to mitigate some of the risk, but we cannot mitigate all of the risk, so in that sense we try to engage in good cashflow and investment practices, so that bitcoin can end up playing out as something that we can recognize and appreciate to have fewer risks (in some respects) than the dollar, even though at the same time, bitcoin has some areas that it is risky in which the dollar is not... so it is not like risk can be described as just one thing since there are various kinds of risk, some of them we can control and others we can mitigate and others we can try to figure out, to the extent we might not know aspects the future, so some risks might ONLY become known at a later point down the road, not that we can even presume that any of us has complete (or perfect) knowledge in the first place, since some of us might know about certain kinds of risk but others might be ignorant in regards to that angle of bitcoin as compared with some other assets and/or currencies that we might choose to invest into.


For sure, long term holding time frame will soften out short term volatility, yet it still might not completely soften all volatility... yet at the same time, we tend to realize that on an ongoing longer term basis, bitcoin prices tend to gravitate upwardly, and we can see that upward gravitation in the 200-WMA.  Bitcoin upward price slope is not guaranteed to continue, yet there is no real evidence to show bitcoin's investment thesis is getting any weaker with the passage of time, and surely a lot of bitcoin's investment thesis and network effects (as outlined by Trace Mayer) seem to be getting stronger rather than weaker with the passage of time, even though the upward slope of bitcoin's price curve (in terms of percentages) is not likely to be as steep as it has been historically.


Even though the ideas are similar.. the better description is to "mitigate risk" rather than "minimize risk," especially since we should realize that we do not know all of the risks, since even if there are known unknowns when it comes to risks, there is also the category of unknown unknowns.. and so we try to mitigate as much as we can, whether we know or not, and we might not necessarily be able to address all of the risks so we might engage in practices to balance them out since we cannot really change them.. which is another reason that the expression to "mitigate risks" is better than the expression of "minimizing risks".. minimizing risks assumes that you know the risks and that you are able to address them rather than realizing that there are trade-offs and balances in regarsds to the known and unknown risks.


I am not going to necessarily agree that we understand each other or that we are on the same side, since I don't claim to understand some of the things that you were saying, and I am not sure if you were purposefully being arrogant in some of your earlier claims that seems to border upon know it all proclamations that poo-pooed some of the cashflow management and investment management ideas.

Emergency fund is a kind of back up funds.. so back up fund is a more generic term that covers emergency funds, reserve funds and float money.

I also have my doubts that any of us are necessarily searching for perfection, but instead potentially trying the best that we can to tailor our approach to bitcoin towards our own financial and psychological circumstances... and sometimes as a beginner we might not really know what factors to weigh when we are considering how much or how to invest into bitcoin or to otherwise engage in attempts to build and maintain good cashflow management practices.


We do not necessarily need a lot of knowledge to get started investing into bitcoin since we can build on various kinds of basic knowledge that are the only foundational knowledge matters that will justify our getting started investing in bitcoin, such as determining that we have a discretionary income and investing into bitcoin within the boundaries of our discretionary income.


Emergency funds would likely be meant to prepare for unexpected happenings, and sure if some things are more likely then we might want to have more funds besides the emergency funds, like you said, but if you have absolutely no bitcoin and you are building up a 3 month emergency fund and also some 1-3 month or more supplemental reserve fund, then you may well never start investing into bitcoin, which does not seem like a good plan.  It actually sounds like a retarded plan that is meant to prevent folks from ever getting ahead if they are keeping 6 months or more of value in cash or other inferior investments merely based on ideas that those places are more liquid than bitcoin and will ultimately help them in times of emergencies or whatever the fuck purposes you are holding that much cash and failing refusing to invest into bitcoin because of your preoccupation to keep money in inferior places.


Having a large amount of assets denominated in dollars seems problematic to me.  As several of us mentioned so many times, it is likely a good thing to build up emergency funds and other forms of back up funds at the same time as building up the bitcoin investment, and so at some point maybe there is enough money in the various back up funds and then more focus can be made to put more money into bitcoin and realizing that the various back up funds are not very good places to store value, even though a few months of emergency is likely good and also some amounts of funds for various anticipated expenses can be good too, such as saving for a computer, or phone, or to repair your sink, or a bicycle for your daughter, or to take your wife on a mini-vacation or some other kind of expenses that you might not have money for but need to save up for.


There is nothing disagreeable about that point.