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For small players, fish and such, like most of us, I would consider NYKNYC and related security practices as absolutely essential in securing our stash. I would not permanently park more than single-digit BTC amounts in an exchange.
I largely agree with all of the points of your post, except for the above, I would clarify that I have a personal practice of keeping some coins on exchanges, and over the years, the amounts have gotten smaller and smaller, and I tend to think of the amount of BTC that I have on exchanges and/or with other third parties as a kind of percent or a bearable percent that I can deal with and I have always maintained some of that..which was quite embarrassingly high in 2016 and 2017 which caused me some issues and which currently for me I would consider my on exchange and/or 3rd party exposure to be somewhere in the ballpark of less 5% to 10%, even though currently I have right around 5% on exchanges.
My rule is probably not even very strict.. since there is individual variance that may well depend on learning things... which can take a while for people (including yours truly) to learn things.. especially new things that I did not already know.. (go figure?).
I think that newbies getting into bitcoin might start out with BTC price exposure rather than directly holding their private keys, and surely there is a bit of a learning curve with various self-custody options, so even though I am a proponent of self-custody, and I think that bitcoin gets its value (and its freedom power) from self-custody even if not everyone is doing it, there are quite a few forms of custodial services that still might be reasonably employed by normie newbie individuals, and starting out with bitcoin by getting price exposure through various custodial services, including but not limited to Bitcoin Spot ETFs seems better to me than not getting into bitcoin at all.
There are degrees of empowerment.
Even though I don't own any bitcoin spot ETFs, and I probably would not buy into them any unless my already existing 401k holdings were to allow me to convert some of that value to Bitcoin Spot ETFs.. .. though I still might not do it based on my already existing large exposure to bitcoin through direct ownership.. .. even though sometimes it could pique some curiosity if such a BTC spot ETF thing were to come available to me through a tax free retirement investment vehicle that I already have in place.
we got over 93k. would be nice to see a higher push maybe 95k today.
The options cat is out of the bag. Shit is going to get absolutely wild now. There isn't much selling left to be done except maybe in April for taxes...
I grabbed my first call option to dip my toe in the water. With IBIT trading at $53.43 as I type this, I purchased an option to buy 100 shares at $63 with a 1/16/26 expiry date. That should take me through whatever bubble is approaching. With the costs involved, I need a 47% gain between now and the end of next year in order to be in the profit (if I were to exercise the option). I thought this was a decent trade given the expectations for the coming year. I do plan to take slightly more insane options positions for fun but I'd like to wait a little bit and see where the market settles after this development.
I deleted my original response.. .. Maybe I am just confused why there would be a need to make more money by employing potentially complicated financial products if we are fairly sure that we have decently good odds that the BTC price is already going to be going up 47% or more for the year... maybe the odds are greater than 50/50 for that outcome, then why add an extra layer of complexity?
I am not going to do it anyhow.. since I kind of like where the BTC price already is.. so even another 10%, 20% or so is already icing on the cake, and sure don't get me wrong, since I already think that there are pretty good odds that we are going even higher than that this coming year, and there could be decently good odds (perhaps greater than 3%) that we could get $1 million or more BTC prices by the end of 2025 or perhaps into early 2026, so even if the odds are not great, I cannot see myself wanting even more..
We already have a good thing going, so why do I need even more? even though I am not going to complain if higher than expected prices end up playing out.
Currently it is starting to look like we might never see sub $70k BTC prices again.. sure it is not guaranteed, but I am having trouble figuring out how the 200-WMA is going to get drug up to those levels.. since it is still ONLY moving up right around $40 per day... and it is just barely above $41k right now... but yeah, lots of ongoing hype.. and yeah, maybe once Trump gets sworn in then we will get a dump.. but will it get below $70k? Maybe we will have spot prices in the $120k to $180k range by then.. that would be 30% to 95% higher than current prices. I am still having troubles considering how I would want even more than that.
Maybe I am just being fuddy duddy about trading instruments, when I personally cannot see any reasonable purpose for such... but hey, to each their own.
Updating "1.5x per year" trend...
So far 2023-2024 season is quite similar to 2019-2020.
Back in the good ole days, I can recall that you used to publish these as the 2x trend.
My how times have changed!!!
Adam Back said that BTC will reach a 7-figure this cycle when the U.S create a BTC strategic reserve.
Crazy times ahead.
that would be too much escalation for all the OG grandpas here... that being said, there are worse deaths than heart attacks while f*cking supermodels with blow trickling out of one's nose
I am not sure.
It seems Back means that by this cycle, then we would get to $1 million plus by the end of 2025 or perhaps early 2026, so that is around 11x from current BTC prices. That is a lot, but those are still not crazy numbers, including what has been done in previous cycles.
Yeah, right now we are already 30% above the 2021 ATH.. so it is more difficult to use current prices as our jumping off point.
Maybe if we used $27k as our jumping off point, then $1 million would be 37x .. and yeah, I am a bit bothered by peak prices anyhow, especially since it may well be difficult to sustain something like $1 million, yet it becomes more difficult to correct back below $200k or so too.. so maybe the most we would get is a 60% to 70% correction as some kind of a spike and maybe not sustainable downity.. .. but yeah, it is difficult to know... .. even my 0.63 plus bitcoin would be doing pretty good at those levels of BTC prices.
