DCA protects you because you are not able to know the BTC price in the future.  For sure, if you know that the BTC price is going down, then it is better to wait and buy the dip, yet the overwhelming majority of the time, you don't know that the BTC price is going down, even when it seems that all signs are that the BTC price might go down, it ends up going up.

DCA does not protect you from down.. even though perhaps if you are buying all of the time (such as every week), there will be times when the BTC price is up and other times in which the BTC price is down, but you cannot really know in advance, so then your BTC price ends up being largely an average of the whole time that you had been buying, and if you are trying to time the downs, then you may or may not have success to have a lower price per BTC... yet it seems that even if each of us would like a lower price per BTC, there is almost no way that we we can accomplish the keeping of our average cost per BTC low if we are also wanting to keep buying bitcoin and growing our bitcoin stash... which in some sense it seems that it should be a higher goal to grow our BTC stash.

I have given quite a few realistic examples in the past to show that one guy had spent half or even 1/3 or even a fraction as much as another guy (and he even had a lower cost per BTC), yet the guy who had spent more money may have had 20% or 30% more BTC, but had double or even triple the cost, yet since bitcoin has historically performed so well, it would have had been way better to be the guy who had accumulated more bitcoin as compared to the guy who had a lower cost per BTC.

Do we need to go through such examples again?  I am not opposed to going through such examples, especially if it will help guys to attempt to understand the various dynamics, yet it seems once of the better ways for guys to understand the dynamics is to figure out their own examples and even if they are living through their experiences.. . Guys who are trying to accumulate bitcoin every single week likely know that every single week they have to decide if to invest all of their available BTC purchasing money in DCAing into bitcoin or if they are going to hold some back for either buying on the dip or for some passage of time, and there are trade-offs since guys are never going to know whether the BTC price is going to go down or not..and many times, especially during a bull market is that the BTC price is going to go up, but even the presumption could be wrong.. which the same is true during a bear market, there maybe be a presumption that the BTC price is going to go down, yet the presumption could end up being wrong... So each guy has to decide each week, an there is a question regarding the extent to which it is valuable to hold back backing or to defer buying based on conjecture that there could be a dip that might not end up happening.


I doubt that financial management is a downside of DCA, since you need good financial management no matter how you invest. DCA allows you to adjust, and yeah, if you are DCAing too much, then you might be spending beyond your discretionary income, and so you could DCA whimpily  and have lesser chances of overdoing it... yet you are still not describing a disadvantage of DCA, but instead a disadvantage the you (and perhaps others) might end up buying BTC with money that they want to use for other things, and so surely the more that any of us chooses to put into BTC, then the more likely that we are going to suffer in other ways in the current times, because that money ends up getting locked up into bitcoin and perhaps might not be available for 4-10 years or longer.. which has some costs, especially for guys who choose to invest in bitcoin aggressively.  They end up not having discretionary money to enjoy their life (consume) in the present.. .Their pleasure is deferred, which is not easy and is a problem with any investing, not just DCA.


Of course, I am sorry for your losses that may even go beyond your having had waited to buy bitcoin, yet at the same time, I was not really criticizing you for fucking up in the past, but instead criticizing you for proclaiming that waiting and buying on dips is the best way, which you continue to make similar mistakes  in that direction and either explicitly or implicitly proclaim that waiting is a good approach to bitcoin and trying to time bottoms is a good way to invest in bitcoin.  Sure, you are not tending to go in details regarding your preference, but you still have those ideas underlying many of your substantive posts.. and sure, maybe I am getting to know you too well? and I don't agree with pushing those ideas, since they are likely not generally good, and they probably are not good in your case either, even though sure you are free to make decisions for yourself, as you do continue to do.


I largely get your points, yet you seem to be stating some of your points wrong.

Sure there are a variety of kinds of risks that we can identify, and then we can potentially take actions to mitigate the various risks, so for example, if we recognize various scenarios that bitcoin could go to zero (or sufficiently negative that it ultimately means zero), we can make sure that we do not invest more than we can afford to lose and we can even hedge downward.  I don't personally engage in hedging...

So a lot of times we may well manage risks with our position size, and even considering downside possibilities with upside possibilities, but we sill might choose not to put everything into bitcoin because we recognize several scenarios that include downside possibilities.

We also may recognize that downside possibilities in 2025 are likely not as great as they were in either 2014 (the year of my forum registration) or 2017 (the year of your forum registration).  So over the years we might create our position sizes in accordance with our perceptions of various risks, and we likely know folks who completely chose not to invest in bitcoin in either 2014 and/or 2017 because they thought that the risks outweighed the possible benefits, yet those guys are not doing as well as even the guys who took relatively modest positions and to only invest 10% of their bitcoin investment portfolio in bitcoin... or maybe some of us might have had purposefully chosen not to front load into bitcoin in the early years, and instead to spread our investment over 8 years through DCAing. Those are implementation choices to help to deal with our perception of risks, and if we overly focus on the risks, some of us might  have had lost out on bitcoin's reward over the past 8 or even 11 years.

Probably in the end, position size is one of the great ways to mitigate risks, even though position size does not completely get rid of any of the risks whether known or unknown... just mitigates the risk to a level that each of us can completely decide upon, which is how much money do we want to put into bitcoin as compared with other places that we could put the money (presuming that we are referring to discretionary income).

There are also various execution risks that relate to how well we calculate and manage our money, we can create more risks if we manage/calculate badly. 

Other execution risks might relate to how we store our coins (with third parties or privately) and maybe how much we might attract attention to ourselves (or our bitcoin) in terms of getting attacked, either in person or through various anonymous or quasi-anonymous ways.

By the way, another risk that each of us might consider is that there might be a variety places that we might have investments, and sure as our investments grow (even if we don't have any bitcoin), we might recognize that our various kinds of investments still have a kind of dollar (fiat) component that underlies them, so a guy who earns $30k per year might spend more than 10 years investing in various assets at a rate of around 15% of his income... so after 10 years, he would have had invested right around $45k into the investment.. so then after the 10 years, he might look at his various investments and try to figure out the extent to which they appreciated in value or depreciated in value, and are they worth more than $45k or not?  Surely many assets have appreciate in terms of dollar value, especially over 10 years, we may well have a doubling of value of our various assets, yet the dollar is likely worth ONLY half as much as it was 10 years earlier.. so frequently assets will ONLY tend to keep up with their debasement rather than outpace the debasement of the dollar, and any of the asset that might haver had been kept directly in dollars rather than invested, then it would be likely worth only half as much (in terms of its purchasing power) after 10 years.  Those are risks, and surely a pretty BIG risk to keep too much value directly in dollars, which is part of the reason that many of us suggest to not be over-exuberant in regards to how many dollars that we are holding beyond the three months of expenses of our emergency fund.


I doubt that there are any specific needs to sell our bitcoin  in large amounts rather than employing some kind of a sustainable withdrawal system that can be price-based and/or time-based, even though I consider that time-based sustainable withdrawal may start to make sense earlier than time-based sustainable withdrawal.


Yep.  Selling and trying to buy back cheaper when we are still in our accumulation stage is not a good idea since it may well end up slowing down BTC accumulation.

Even once we reach overaccumulation status there should be no reasons to sell bitcoin with expectations of buying back cheaper.  It is not a good way of managing our holdings even if we are authorizing ourselves to sell certain quantities of our BTC based on price and/or based on time.