Advice for noobs being baptized by HODL fire during the 2018 Bitcoin crash.
If anyone bought Bitcoin this year, you are probably hurting. When I say “be prepared to see your investment drop by at least half” I’m not kidding.
I’m a buyer here all the way down to $3800 USD. I plan to hold the BTC I buy now for 1–2 years minimum.
I’ve been through this 3 times already. It sucks especially if you bought near the top, you feel it in the pit of your stomach. You get backpain. You question yourself. Some even think of suicide as the price approaches capitulation levels. (Seek help if you are feeling this way.)
You are now discovering what the HODL meme means. Your mettle is being tested and your ability to resist giving up your BTC is being branded by the hellfire of a vicious bitcoin correction.
If you survive this, and if BTC reaches $20k again, you’ll either have a hard time letting it go, or you’ll let it go and then kick yourself if it keeps rising to $100k like I feel it will within 3–5 years.
It’s never a bad idea to take profits, but so many friends of mine who got BTC from 2011–2013 sold as soon as we broke $1000 last year. I don’t recommend ever selling ALL of your BTC.
My recommendation:
If you own BTC, withdraw from exchanges, hold it on a hardware wallet, and go about your life. Try to enjoy the holidays.
Try meditation, get a back massager from Amazon:
- Shoot for a maximum of 5% of your total net worth exposure to BTC. If it goes to zero, it’s not going to change your life. If it does a 10X, that’s life changing.
- Buy small amounts of BTC monthly no matter what the price until you get to your target amount.
- Keep your BTC on a hardware wallet like a Trezor or Ledger, not on an exchange. Exchanges can be hacked. Not your keys, not your coins.
- Don’t overexpose yourself to ANY asset class.
- Don’t think of this as a trade, think of this as a retirement fund.
- Be prepared to see it all evaporate. This is an experiment that could still fail.
There’s 16 million millionaires in the USA alone, what happens if they all try to own 1 bitcoin?
We are seeing more infrastructure and development being built on Bitcoin than ever before. Fundamentals are very strong. The current price of bitcoin is not the value of bitcoin.
Bitcoin is prone to these very volatile boom & bust cycles. However, the thesis that it’s the world’s most sound form of money has not changed.
Bitcoin could likely be at $3000 USD by Christmas, and I would still be as bullish as ever long term.
There’s only ever going to be 21 million BTC. It’s a deflationary asset, unlike fiat which is printed at will.
The US national debt is over 22 Trillion USD. Global debt is over 200 Trillion. Global derivatives exposure is unfathomable, in the quadrillions.
Take solace that we are not suffering alone. The stock markets are retracing nearly as bad as Bitcoin.
There’s a war on cash & privacy globally.
Bitcoin is the technical evolution of money. It’s a censorship resistant form of Austrian sound money. Like gold, but for the age of the internet.
What about altcoins?
Bitcoin is not only the biggest, most known, original cryptocurrency – but it’s the most decentralized one.
Cryptocurrency is valuable because of it’s decentralized, unstoppable nature.
If something is unable to be shut down, like BitTorrent, then it disrupts the status quo even if governments don’t like it.
Banks, central banks, governments, regulators etc can not shut Bitcoin off. It’s too late.
Altcoins however are very susceptible to attacks by bad actors like hostile miners, or from regulators & governments. Altcoins will buckle at the central points of failure under any stress from authorities.
I invest in altcoins but I don’t believe in them like I do Bitcoin. I don’t recommend you buy altcoins unless you seriously do your research and know what you are doing.
If you really care about Bitcoin as money aside from just a long term sovereign store of wealth, educate yourself!
Watch videos by Andreas Antonopolous.
Take some of your BTC out of your hardware wallet and onto a mobile wallet as a “checking” account and use your BTC.
Lastly, don’t be fooled by charlatans who try to trick you into buying altcoins with the “bitcoin” name in them. The family of Bitcoin Cash coins (BCH, BSV, BCHABC, BAB) are not bitcoin. They are altcoins.
