I doubt there is exactly any kind of a strict formula (like 30% for example... because if you are going to support yourself for 6 months on your emergency fund, then you likely would need more than 30%.. even though maybe you could calculate that you might be able to survive on 30% of your actual income if you were put into an emergency situation that involved losing your cashflow for 6 months.. or various kinds of scenarios that can be contemplated an are somewhat individualistic in the ways that the probabiliites of the emergencies and how they might happen might play out). 

Many of us likely can get some kind of a framework in regards to how consistent is our cashflow (and how much of a cushion that we might have or not), and how complicated our expenses are (if they are consistent, or if there are a bunch of built-in "unknowns," for example).

For example, if we are a single guy with a steady job and we are living on 50% of our salary (and we have 50% that can be spent however we like), then it would likely be way more straight-forward for a guy in that kind of a situation as compared to someone who might engage in work that has very inconsistent cashflows that might even be partly dependent on the efforts of others (such as running and/or owning a business), and also if a person has a family that s/he supports with his/her income, then there could be some inconsistencies regarding those expenses, depending on if some or all of the other members are contributing to the family finances or if they might be causing some unexpected increases in expenses. 

More complicated situations likely justify retaining a higher amount of liquid value in reserves.  By the way, liquid means that you are able to spend it or get access to it right away without any obstacles.. something like cash is very liquid, and residential property is not very liquid, stocks might have some liquidity, but might take several days or even weeks to liquidate.. Of course, bitcoin is pretty damned liquid, but if you are investing in bitcoin, you would not necessarily want bitcoin to count as part of your "emergency" funds until your holdings are in sufficient profits, and maybe you don't even want to be forced to sell it while you consider yourself to be in early BTC accumulation stages..

Like I said having some variation of 6 months cash reserves can be really great and empowering for any investor to achieve and to thereby allow a lot of investing freedom when the cashflow and the reserves are sufficiently/adequately in place to provide for that kind of flexibility, and how those reserves are held can vary too.. so they might need to have some amount of liquidity in terms of being able to be drawn from over 6 months, so they might not need to be 100% liquid upon demand in order to be able to be drawn from over a period of 6 months if such an emergency situation were to end up playing out that drug out for 6 months or maybe longer, but at the same time, if there is 6 months of reserves, and the reserves start to be depleted, many folks are not going to just sit back and let the reserves deplete because the situation would start to become even more and more stressful in the event that the reserves continue to be depleted and they get down to some kind of level of exhaustion or near exhaustion.

There is a big gap between Bitcoin holding and gambling. The fundamental thing that comes up first is that Bitcoin has volatility so it can go from high to low. But in gambling there is no such chance. Gamblers bet money either get it back or lose it. If lost there is no second chance. One of the great successes of Bitcoin is that some people win even when they lose temporarily. What does that mean? From what I can see, those who bought Bitcoin at the highest price around $70K can also boast of being Bitcoin holders. Because it will go to that stage again. While I can't guarantee the timing here, I can assure that it will reach that level or exceed that price. Those who held bitcoins at whatever price they were purchased did not lose. But those who fail to put it in their basket are losers. There may also be times when a Satoshi becomes most desirable assets ‍and most expensive. So everyone should make good use of their time. Many people aim to get rich quick from bitcoin but the important lesson is “If You Can't Hold, You Won't Be Rich” which is my favorite quote from CZ  about holding.

Talking about cash flow vs investment and not undermining the place of emergency funds, the fact is that the amount in reserve determines how much percentage we are willing to put into investment and what our risk tendency depends on, if the emergency reserve is in surplus, the tendency to increase investment in a high-risk investment like bitcoin will be high and the amount of time the individual is willing to wait for the investment to mature over a long period the cash in high possible profits on the investment.
Achieving financial freedom and sufficiency means different thing and approach to different individuals and the approach to achieving though varies from individual vs individual, but one of the common attribute of financial freedom is the amount of cash flow of the individuals regardless of whatever method or approach to be used.

I don't know why people are still comparing bitcoin with gamble. Bitcoin is a life safer if you can hodl your coins for long,because the possibility of making profit is high if you understand the market analysis. In gambling you can never be certain that you will win a game even though you have a game strategy because gambling is based on luck. Bitcoin is not based on luck to make profit but based on the knowledge that you have about the crypto market. Trading is something that is not for everybody and it is only the traders that can take risk that are always successful. I prefer to hodl for long till when the price has reach my target selling price before I do sell,because it is easier for me that way.

I agree with you, a single guy with consistent cash flow for 6 months can continue to accumulate more bitcoin because he will be able to save some money due to less emergency spending,which he can always use this savings to buy bitcoin. On the other hand a family man with inconsistent income will have a big challenge to meet up with his emergency spending and wouldn't even think of buying bitcoin because he need to satisfy himself and his family first,which might be impossible most times. Emergency spending most times consumes major part of one's income because it is natural that we can't see into the future to know what will befall us and know how much is needed everyday for our emergency spending.

I would consider the difference between investing and gambling to be more on a continuum rather than having clear demarcations - and so there are likely many assets that could be used for either gambling or investing depending on how they are played in terms of use of information in skillful rather than luck kinds of ways... we can think of some kinds of gambling games that are nearly pure luck (and chance), and so sometimes we can consider extremes and there may likely even be some kinds of gambling games that can have the chances of winning greatly improved if you realize what skills might be employed in order to increase the odds.


You phrase that in a strange way, and so I guess I kind of see part of your point in regards to volatility that could go either direction with some kind of assets, such as bitcoin, and sometimes people will mix up with the idea of volatility (and even difficult to predict) as if investing into bitcoin was merely a game of chance because it goes all over the place in terms of its price, its volatility and its many times bucking the trend in regards to what logic might suggest that its direction should be.

So, essentially, we likely are able to recognize that people are wrong about bitcoin when they fail to understand and or appreciate some aspects in bitcoin that might exist beyond some of the manipulation tools and/or sentiment (or momentum) indicators that they might be using in order to attempt to predict BTC price dynamics/direction.


More sophisticated gamblers don't bet all or nothing in one shot... so your attempt to make that specific contrast does not seem to be completely correct.


You are guaranteeing while not guaranteeing.  That hardly makes any sense, except that it is possible to say that bitcoin both has great odds to the upside, and that bitcoin is an asymmetric bet that allows for a decent potential for great returns as long as you are not fucking around with leverage.. but instead just merely deciding an amount to bet (invest) and then just waiting it out 4-10 to 20 or more years and then see if your bet (investment) paid off greater than if you had merely just kept it under your mattress or perhaps investing it in more traditional ways (such as stocks, bonds, gold or property).

Having an asymmetric bet to the upside is not even close to being guaranteed - even though people do not seem to be able to get the concept of "guaranteed" out of their heads.. they will say it is not guaranteed and then use words to describe it as if it were guaranteed... It is not an easy thing for any of us to get our minds around, and I am not even claiming to be completely exempt from such word/definitional traps.


That's all true.  Historically bitcoin has tended to have great performance for anyone who did not cave in and who held long enough.. then they would tend to beat almost any other investments had they done the same thing - and with the added bonus that bitcoin would have had been much easier to get into as compared to some investments are not easy to get into... but even with bitcoin, there are ways that a lot of us could have still ended up losing if we had failed to sufficiently/adequately secure our coins.

We also know that historical performance does not guarantee future performance, while at the same time, there are no real signs that bitcoin's investment thesis is getting any weaker with the passage of time, but instead it is likely getting stronger with the passage of time.. even though again, that does not mean that there are not going to be a variety ways that guys (and gal) can lose their coins along the way or that there is even close to the same exact dynamics in terms of price potential of bitcoin if any one is starting to invest into bitcoin now with a current market cap of around half a $trillion versus getting into bitcoin when it was struggling to reach a billion prior to 2013.

Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of UPside potential. but likely there are limits too.. including that currently monetary asset classes are (including other forms of assets that hold a monetary premium) is likely included as a full current potential in current dollars as less than $1quadrillion dollars which is ONLY a 2,000x (talking about current dollar value) - but then if we consider that new inventions and technologies will also cause some of the ways in which value is even possible to most likely to be going up.. then we might be able to even imagine a world that might have somewhere in the ballpark of $1-$10quadrillion of value in current dollar value - but still would ONLY end up causing the full market potential of bitcoin to be in the ballpark of 20,000x from its current place - even if we were to assume that all monetary value ends up flowing intogravitating to the most sound of the monetary assets (currently held by dee cornz).


I don't disagree with this point, yet from a technical point of view, it's a pretty easy "problem to fix" to potentially add sub-satoshis as a further down unit.. even though.. it would not take away from your point in regards to satoshis being our current base unit on the bitcoin blockchain in terms of it being 1/100million of a bitcoin.


For sure.. something like.. don't lose your bitcoin, should be a prudent goal for a lot of people - even if they might not believe that they are able to accumulate very much based on their current situation.. but they still anticipate that they might be able to live a decently long time into the future.. so therefore, even if you are ONLY able to accumulate $10 per month at present times, then it still could add up to be a decent amount of money  when we are looking 20-40 years down the road.. (and who knows the timeline with any kind of specificity).. .. and also if a person of very modest investing means believes that s/he has good chances of still being alive 20-40 years down the road, then s/he might want to spend a decent amount of time to figure out if s/he is able to improve the amount of his/her disposable income by either increasing income or decreasing expenses.. and so even if there might be some difficulties in this year or the next year, sometimes there could be ways to build skills, networks and/or abilities to be able to improve income down the road (in real terms not merely nominal terms... because your dollar is hardly going to be worth shit 20-40 years down the road if it were to still exist, it might cost $1million for a loaf of bread, so it is good to be making improvements in real terms, not getting mislead into believing conditions are improved merely because nominal terms have improved).


You do not need to be adding to your "cash reserves" or your "emergency fund" every month once you get to a kind of sustainable level.  I recall at one point in my life when I was single (no business and no family) that I had a monthly cashflow cushion of $500 (which just meant that the lowest point that the checking account balance projection would ever get would be $500)... but that did not account for other places in which I might have to draw if my income dried up or my expenses increased.  When I added a business then I had to increase that $500 amount to $1,500 and there were times that I went up higher and down lower, and sometimes when I would lower it too much then I would see that I was getting into "pickles" too frequently, so I would raise it order to lessen my chances of getting into "pickles.".. so cash cushion is one thing and then how much in reserves is another thing - and if you are having to dip into your reserves frequently, and if you are always (or frequently) into the practice of engaging in replenishing it, then it may well be a sign that it is NOT high enough.. or something is wrong with your balancing of factors, your life style or maybe just the various ways of your income are really inconsistent or your expenses are "all over the place.".. it might also be a sign that you are overly investing into BTC (or whatever other investments that you might have) .

I would imagine that it would be preferable to get to a position in which you are not bouncing around a lot (sure some bouncing is probably not a bad sign in terms of needing to be somewhat aggressive and not overly whimpy in terms of how much you are investing into risky assets - such as bitcoin), and so it is not necessarily easy to strike something close to a balance - and the ultimate goal would be that you are choosing how much to invest into bitcoin based on "extra" cashflow that comes from income and/or fewer expenses, rather than every month struggling to replenish your emergency funds that are already overly depleted... and of course, those are judgement calls in which you have to figure out your own proper, appropriate and comfortable balancing.

There is always going to be some risk in any kind of strategy that is attempting to make some progress and to attempt to be somewhat assertive about it (versus some kinds of strategy that might either barely keep up with inflation or that might actually lose value in the future because they fail/refuse to sufficiently attempt to account for inflation).

So, yes.. I would not consider the likelihood that some mistakes are going to be made along the way to be deal-breakers because hopefully, you can just deal with the mistake or the ramifications of the mistake(s) once it (they) happen, yet there still is quite a bit of value in terms of trying to figure out how likely are certain mistakes to happen, and then how big would be the ramifications for each of the mistakes, because there could be ways to at least mitigate how likely it would be that the mistakes would happen and to even make it pretty unlikely that the mistakes would completely destroy you or even that that maybe you might have some mistakes that you would consider to be severe.. but they would ONLY end up dipping into your principle by 10% or 20% rather than some mistakes could end up having something like 70% to 90% dipping into your principle, so even though you may be willing to suffer some unlikely damages, it would be prudent and practical to be able to attempt to recognize the difference in the magnitude and likelihood because sometimes people engage in behavior that has decent chances of producing a 70% to 90% reckening and maybe they are calculating it as if it were only less than a 10% reckening if it were to happen... - including that frequently there are periods in the building of investments and/or principle that can take years and years and years to establish, so if you reck yourself by 70% to 90%, it's not like you can just bounce back in a period of time that is significantly shorter than how long it took you the first time, and in some cases, it is almost impossible to build the same principle at later dates because the costs have changed....

For example in bitcoin, there may have been some abilities in around 2015 to build a 40-50 bitcoin stash for $10k-$15k.... and so if you had built up 40-50 bitcoin, and then you had spent 10-20 of them, and you are feeling pretty good because you still have a pretty solid 20-30 bitcoins that are mostly in some form of cold storage, then if you end up losing 70-90% of them because you fuck around too much and take too many risks, then you end up with around 5 BTC, even though you still have some bitcoin, you are hardly ever going to be able to make it back to having 40-50 bitcoin, and you may well even be damned lucky (meaning that it is quite unrealistic) that you would be able to get back to some kind of a solid status of having 20-30 bitcoins in the next 5-10 years, if ever.

Sure, everyone needs to weigh their own circumstances, but there can be real costs to losing principle, depending on the kind of principle (and the kind of asset) that you might have worked hard to acquire and/or attain (or you might have had luck involved in your acquisition and retention of such asset, too).


There are surely needs to attempt to tailor to yourself and to your own various variables, and none of are necessarily going to completely know how you might engage in some of your calculations or how you might value one asset over another asset (or even valuing time, energy, health and relations).  So in that regard, if you dedicate some value to some kinds of things that others would not do, or you end up taking risks that others might not take, there could be some difficult to calculate components and even you might have some difficulties putting exact values (beyond ballpark assessments) regarding why you might be making your allocations in the ways that you are doing...or maybe even there might be some periods where you are making changes 4-5 times in 2 months, and other people are thinking "what the fuck are you doing?" and you are having some troubles figuring out your own calculations, and there might be people who don't change very much in a year and may or may not even look (analyze) what they are doing on even a quarterly basis.

Some strategies (maybe even more aggressive ones) likely need more interaction, and sometimes there could be better results by not trying to be so aggressive and calculating, but sometimes we might not even know aspects of ourselves that might be causing us to engage in various kinds of work that is NOT really productive use of our time.. but we might not ever realize that or ONLY come to realize the matter at a much later date.

This is the mistake that some people make and can never be corrected because they don't think that it is a big time one that can lead to their wreck. Most times it is impossible to achieve back such lost because it took a very long time to achieve that success. Since we can't see into the future it is hard for one to know the kind of error that will be made which we lead one to such situation. What I mean is that it is better we become careful with our investment and take accurate prevention measures from making such mistakes,because what you could acquire very easy ten years ago will be very difficult to achieve it in fifteen year time because of inflation and some unforseen forces around us.

I had a similar experience, when I had a business which I run,there is this close friend of mine,he is always around me all the time and knows most of my customers because we are always together. Sometimes when I want to dash out to buy my goods,I will leave him with the business to be in charge while am gone. One day I had a to go on a long trip which I spent almost two months before I came back,to my greatest surprise my friend told me that he can no longer cope with me anymore. My business has run down and when I asked him,he said that he sent me some money when I was away and that was the cause. Unknowingly to me that he was selling and replacing the goods keeping all the profits to himself and at the same time he used my money to invest into the same kind of business and took away all my customers. When I noticed was when I called one of my big customer who buys in large quantity,he told me that I am no longer into the business and he just bought goods worth 1million in my local currency. It took me a very long time to get most of my customers back because he lied and told them so many bullshit about me. This is how it is when you have invested in bitcoin and you carelessly allowed your wallet to be compromised.

James hasn't wasted his time reading bitcoin books and investing in bitcoin, he has being busy monitoring his investment and following up with the market analysis. At the long run James became the richest amongst his friends who was investing in real estate because bitcoin is a future game changer. This is a good motivation.

It is good to have diversification in business but one should give Bitcoin the highest priority. There are major differences between Bitcoin and real estate trading. But the first thing that comes up is the supply of money. One can easily invest in Bitcoin. If his financial condition is bad, he can buy a fraction of a bitcoin with a small amount of money. But those who run real estate business need more money. Moreover, the amount of risk is also high. It is undoubtedly a long-term process. So all things considered if one can buy bitcoins with a small amount of money then he will be able to earn better profits in the future. Every business has risk factors but the advantage is that even your small investment can turn into your big fortune. So buy as much as one can hold it for the long term.

Btw I'm curious about people saying this to James now
This is an example where we don't get carried away by the people around us and James gets out of his comfort zone where his friends are in Real Estate and he is looking for new opportunities. I think if James has been in bitcoin until now then he has benefited more than his friends who are in Real Estate.

On the other hand, this also clearly applies or as a real slap to people who really only follow their friends or people around who are in bitcoin but they don't really understand about bitcoin because even though it's good to be in bitcoin but when we don't learn more much about it then it's the same as us trying to run in a dark room without knowing there is a trap in it.