its kinda funny but i am sometimes more curious as to how much someone has lost (on paper) than their current net worth.
In some sense, you seem to be referring to an aspect of opportunity costs, since sometimes the "what ifs" and the "could of" "should of" become difficult to quantify - so then with bitcoin over the years we have not ONLY accumulated and compounded value, there have also been a lot of ups and downs along the way that tempted us to sell too much too soon and/or to fail refuse to sufficiently prepare our holdings for UP that may or may not end up coming.
In the case of bitcoin, the UP did end up coming, and those who ongoingly took action to accumulate bitcoin and/or at least not to sell too much too soon, ended up profiting quite stupendously - even though at the same time, arguably there are some of us who might have had chosen to take decently large profits at various points along the way and perhaps even did not accumulate nearly as many BTC as we could have had accumulated, yet even with some whimpiness and/or some mistakes in our bitcoin accumulation, we still ended up doing quite well with our bitcoin, seemingly largely because we were erroring on the side of accumulating bitcoin and/or holding most of our coin rather than taking large profits.
So for example, even if we might have had chosen to take 10% or 20% of our bitcoin off the table after the price had gone up 10x, it surely may well have had seemed like a lot of money to be taking off of the table, yet at the same time, we largely ended up preserving the overwhelming majority of our holdings, and perhaps we were able to engage in such "shaving off" of profits at a few stages in our bitcoin investment journey, and we still ended up doing fine, even if we could have had more BTC, our shaving off of "profits" was mostly reasonable and tempered in terms of our deciding to hang onto a large majority of our holdings.
Of course, on a personal level, I likely have not shaved off as much profits along the way as other guys, even though I do frequently talk about some of my inclinations to sharve off more profits from time to time... and there are also some guys here who are not so excited about the idea of selling any of our bitcoin holdings, but then it seems that if we want to enter into lending relationships, then we might be putting our bitcoin at risk in those kinds of arrangements, too, even though I understand the advantages of not having to pay taxes on the various sales of the cornz.
i dont worry too much about "what if i bought more" type of scenarios as i got into it (mining btc as a hobby in 2011) not realizing the absolutely stupid amounts of money it would make.
however being married and (then) close to retirement i have played the safe game, as wasting a gift like btc at our age would of been folly. so around 2017ish after the 20k runup and during its slide down i cashed out a not insignificant chunk of my stack at like 15kish and left potential future profit on the table for a solid locked in retirement now (then).
since then, never looked back and its been, is, and im sure will continue to be, a rockin time. the time we gained (retiring early with ease) was well worth it.
