Please take a moment to get my point before you conclude. I know a lot of people judge a post by the topic alone and if that is applied to mine, I might be sounding anti-bitcoin since selling is highly demonized by a lot of people in this community.
Now the question is, assuming everyone who ever bough bitcoin is holding their bitcoin in their private wallets, what will be the fate of bitcoin and the bitcoin network? Does holding bitcoin strengthen the bitcoin network? If no, are those who sell and more their bitcoin on-chain generally doing bitcoin bad?
I believe in holding bitcoin and I'm actually holding some quantity and still buying. But a greater part of me feels that there should be more to bitcoin that just buying and holding in private wallet to gain some profits. I believe that bitcoin will be much more beautiful if a good number of human populations are using bitcoin for their daily lives and have real testimony that bitcoin actually made their lives better. We cannot achieve that if we only encourage people to buy and hold, can we?
I don't know if I have sounded so pessimistic towards bitcoin. From the depth of my heart, I want bitcoin to gain more utility than it has, the reason I made this post to seek opinion if there are people actually thinking in this direction or the right way of thinking about bitcoin is only HODL.
Although buying and holding the Bitcoin has repeatedly been touted as a way to ensure it increases in value, there is clearly more to the network than that. It is quite right of you, to believe that Bitcoin still requires much more than just a speculative investment in order to become truly what it is capable of. It requires practical application, real life transactions and acceptance by wider than simply crypto community. Bitcoin is patterned as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and inflation hedge. This means that, should everyone merely store their Bitcoin and never make any use of it, the network might as well turn stagnant, at least when discussing the aspect of scalability and real transactions bandwidth of the network. The thing is, to rise Bitcoin people should use it to exchange, buy and sell goods and services and feel decentralization and monetary freedom in their everyday life.
It is not a question of demonizing selling or transfer of Bitcoin, only that everyone needs to find a balance on what to hold and what to spend. It is the activity that drives the network and when it is used to do everyday purchases the Bitcoin gains utility and solidifies what the people are willing to hold in the first place. Therefore, although HODLing will certainly be a component of the plan, people will also need to spend, make use of, and popularize the use of Bitcoin and its applications in order to make the network bigger than it is today.
I believe that a healthy Bitcoin ecosystem needs both the possession and consumption of it. It will always remain speculation unless there are actual uses of the product. The greater are the human interactions through meaningful ways, the more valuable and strong is the network.