Of course, each of us has to go by our own circumstances and attempt to tailor our bitcoin approach to our personal situation, which even includes our sense of bitcoin as an investment compared with other places that we might put value.
I likely was fairly convinced about bitcoin from the start, at least in terms of the boundaries of my tentative plan.
When I came to bitcoin, I had already been investing in various kinds of assets for more than 20 years, so I had built up various kinds of holdings, but mostly in index funds and some aspects in property and businesses, yet at the same time, I had frequently been interested in hedging some of my prior investment to make it gold-like (a hedge against the dollar), and one of my abilities to continue to contribute to a 401k plan was drying up, so I wanted to build some investments (potentially bitcoin) to supplement my having had already built the 401k (the 401k investment did not disappear, only my ability to continue to add to it had disappeared), so I was actually thinking that a 10-20 year investment timeline, I might be able to both build my investment into something like bitcoin and to potentially have the bitcoin investment to be equal to or greater than the 401k that I had been building for somewhere close to 20 years.
So my initial plan was to just follow a 6 month budget that I had created, so I divided the 6 months into 26 parts in order to get my weekly bitcoin investment budget that I followed it for about 5 months and since my timeline was running out (around May 2014), I extended my authorization with another 6 month budget.. so then by the time November/December 2014 came, I started to conclude that maybe I had invested about 10% of my total investment portfolio into bitcoin, and I was starting to feel that I had enough..
and so then thereafter I could just invest into other things.. so the BTC price when I started was around $1,100 in late 2013, and in late 2014, the BTC price was around $380.. and so largely at that time, I started to think that I can just play it by ear with any additional investment that I might make and not to worry so much that I largely had enough bitcoin (even though my cost per BTC was around $600 at that time, so my holdings were around 40% in the negative... and I thought things would just work itself out.
Largely after that late 2014 and into a large part of 2015, the BTC price dropped from upper $300s and lower $400s into the mid-to-lower $200s and even had a couple times going into the mid-to-upper $100s.. so I continued to buy a little of bitcoin mostly in the mid $200s, but I largely had some cashflow problems at that time (with one of my businesses), so I was ONLY periodically able to accumulate bitcoin during 2015, yet even with all of that, I calculated that I had reached an overaccumulation stage because in mid to late 2015, my investment into bitcoin started to get to be around 13.5% of my overall investment portfolio, so I started to conclude that I had overaccumulated by around 3.5%, since my initial goal was to just get the bitcoin to be around 10% of my overall investment portfolio... so from my perspective, my considering myself to have had gotten into overaccumuation status gave me some additional options... in order dealing with my BTC portfolio, so i worked out some systems to sell on the way up and to buy on the way down, and developed some other strategies, whiich really did not take me out of BTC accumulation until perhaps around 2017 by the time that maybe I just went into more of a maintenance status, which means that I did not sell too much BTC on the way up in 2017, and then I bought back down in 2018 from whatever I had sold in 2017.. and in the end, I had been developing my various BTC management strategies based on my own circumstances and my perceptions of my circumstances.
I will say that I never really got out of overaccumulation status since you can see from my various charts that I had assessed my BTC holdings to be 9.5% of my total investment portfolio in late 2014, and then it was 13.5% in late 2015, and then it was 80% in late 2017, and then it was 42% in late 2018, 89% in late 2021, and 63% in mid 2022 (the last time that I updated
the chart).
I largely developed strategies that involved selling only small portions of my BTC holdings on the way up.. that might go up to 10% for every doubling, but in practice I did not tend to sell that much and I tended to buy much of if back, yet my theory had been that I wanted to be prepared if the bTC price went shooting up, so that I was never selling so much that I would regret it.. so I had an underlying BTC management approach that had a built in assumption that the BTC price could go shooting up, and then I did not want to be in a position of regretting to having to have sold too much too soon.
So largely through they years I just allowed whatever value in bitcoin to compound upon itself.. which I figure through 2015 and now, my bitcoin holdings has largely gone through
8 or 9 doublings, which adds up to around 256x appreciation, even though I have been considering counting something like $1k to $3k as my average cost per BTC.. so then it becomes easier to calculate with $1k per BTC.
Some comfort develops with being "in profits," but also potentially ongoingly studying our own circumstances in order to figure out if we might want to adjust any of the strategies that we might have... even if we might move from being in accumulation stage to maintenance stage and then to sustainable withdrawal stage.. We likely would be informed by our ongoing studying of bitcoin, in the even that we are engaged in such... and if we are invested in bitcoin, there should be motivation to stay interested in
Wow, that is really something. Respect for how you stayed committed even when the price was dropping, that couldn’t have been easy. It is clear you were not just randomly buying BTC, but had a plan and were thinking ahead about how it fit into your bigger plan.
When reading through, this is me calculating and thinking out at least 10 years long term plan lol..
I like how you broke it down with the budgeting and phases, and also the idea of setting a percentage target for your bitcoin holdings, that is smart. TBH, lot of us including myself, usually skip that part..
Over the years, I have seen quite a few of the instances of guys selling too much too soon and/or failing/refusing to regularly buy bitcoin since they keep thinking that the BTC price is going to dip, and then their mistakes end up affecting their whole approach to bitcoin accumulation in a negative way... such as their inability to get back into bitcoin and other seemingly self-inflicted psychological problems... but yeah, sure there can be a variety of mistakes that contribute towards guys managing their bitcoin accumulation badly.
Yeah, I would say I’ve felt that myself, there’s always that temptation to time it perfectly, and ending up doing nothing or buying later when the price goes up all bcus it refuses to get to the so call perfect entering price. I guess it is like you said earlier, having a system and sticking with it will remove lot of that stress and all.. You kw buying a bit regularly doesn’t feel exciting at first lol, but it is clear that in long term, it is what seems to actually work.
I would think that folks probably have different arrangements in terms of coins they consider hot, medium and cold, and surely the practices could change over the years.
maybe in the very beginning a person keeps everything on an exchange, but he starts to learn about various ways to hold coins.. so the more ways that he holds coins, then if some of them are hot or medium, then they might be more vulnerable.. like how much might you hold on your phone for transactions, or maybe you don't hold much, but if you know that you are going to buy some expensive item, then you might carry the bitcoin on your phone for just that transaction.
you might have funds that you keep for transacting to refill your hot wallet or maybe transacting with friends and family (not on the street), so those might be medium storage, even though you still might need to be careful about UTXO management in tersm fo if some folks might see the balances in the wallets that you are using.. or maybe you learn about lightning network wallets and other kinds of wallets, so then you would still consider if those are hot, medium or cold, and surely the cold would have the most security, even though you might need to check in on them from time to time (once or twice a year or maybe more, depending on your situation), to make sure that you still have access to them.. Guys will make varying choices, and sometimes not want to get into too many details about what they do, yet I do sometimes post on coin management topics, and thin that the main idea is that there are likely levels.. and surely if you are buying $10 per week, it might take close to a year before you might feel a need to move those accumulated coins to a private wallet.
Actually makes a lot of sense. Never really thought about breaking things down into hot, medium, and cold like that, but it is a smart way to manage things without making it too complicated. I would incorporate this..