The idea of rug pull is quite different from up and down market movements, even if you might get the sense that sometimes the BTC price is manipulated up or down, there are players who are trying to push the BTC price in one direction or another, yet bitcoin is likely one of the free-est of markets that currently exists, even if there are behaviors to push its price in one direction or another that may or may not end up being successful.

I see that you have been registered on the form since early 2017, so surely you may well have gotten used to various kinds of price moves in BTC, and in your earliest months of BTC accumulation, it may well not really matter so much when you accumulate BTC, just as long as you start to get into bitcoin, then you will at least have somewhat of a stash of BTC so that you are prepared for UP.

At the same time, if you are continuously worried about BTC prices dropping after you bought, then you likely bought too much and you did not save enough cash to be able to continue to buy when the BTC price goes down (that is if it ends up going down from the prices that you had bought).

Long term investing should just mean ONGOINGLY buying BTC until you get to a certain amount of BTC that you feel that you have enough.. and if you are a long term investor into bitcoin, and you have conviction in bitcoin, then the main thing that you should attempt to focus on is to make sure that you are continuing to build your bitcoin stash through ongoing buying, and it is quite difficult to know when the BTC price is going to fall or if it might fall or if it might not even fall, but as an individual investor, you can decide for yourself how much money you are going to use to continue to buy BTC versus how much you are going to have available to buy on dips. .and at what price points is that money for buying on dips going to be reserved.

If you have been in bitcoin since early 2017, then you could still consider yourself as still buying BTC in terms of long term investing for any new buys that are 4-10 years or longer from the point that you buy the BTC and not necessarily the point that you got started in BTC, even though your earlier purchases of BTC can still inform the extent to which you feel that you need to buy more BTC and what would be the terms upon which you are buying any new BTC.. are you thinking in terms of 4-10 years or longer for any new purchases or are you thinking in other kinds of terms, such as trying to play the wave with any such additional BTC that you might be buying now and planning to sell some or all of that at various points on the way up.  Ether practice could work, even though you might be trying to long term invest and also to have ideas about trading at the same time, which may or may not be a good idea or a good way of thinking about how to manage your BTC accumulation if you perceive yourself to still be in BTC accumulation phases or if you perceive yourself to be in some other stage, such as BTC maintenance or BTC liquidation.. and surely the stages are not absolutes, either, they can overlap one another.

If you are brand new to bitcoin and you are largely DCA buying, then you might not even feel that it is worth it to keep any money available for buying on dips because you DCA buys are fairly regular (maybe even on a weekly basis), and you might well just choose to attempt to time your dips within the week in order to try to buy on dips during each week that you are planning to buy anyhow, but once you get to a certain level of BTC accumulation, you might end up varying your strategy beyond merely DCA buying, and sometimes you will be correct to vary your strategy, and perhaps other times you would just be better off to just keeping on with your DCA buys..

and there is also no reason to believe that DCA buying is boring and our stagnant, especially if you are trying to be aggressive in your DCA approach.  The more aggressive that you are in your DCA approach, the more you need to pay attention to maintaining your emergency fund, and balancing your income versus your expenses in terms of strategizing when you are authorizing yourself to allocate parts of your income to buying bitcoin.  So for example, you could have a income that is between $1,200 and $3k per month, and expenses that vary between $1,600 and $2,200 per month, and surely I tend to be on the conservative side in terms of making sure that my income has come in before I spend it, but sometimes you also might want to make sure that both your income and your expenses are in for the month before you allocate the extra amount towards bitcoin, and since your both your income and your expenses have a decent amount of variance, you might feel a need to maintain a larger emergency fund that is closer to 6 months of expenses (which would be $13,200 ($2,200x6)), and if you have months in which your income is less than your expenses, you might be drawing from those emergency expenses, but you still may or  may not be in a situation in which you are maintaining a minimum amount that you continue to buy BTC no matter what... So, there are a lot of ways in which you can build cushions and priorities and do many things at once, even though some people like to describe DCA as boring, which I doubt that it has to be, except there are ways to purposefully make it boring, and that might be to choose a real lowball amount to DCA, such as $50 per month, even though you have a budget in which you could invest between $50 and $1k per month, depending on how your income versus your expenses play out for that month..


I agree with you that each of us comes to investing in a way that is somewhat aligned with our past ways of doing things, and sometimes there could be ways that we can learn to improve our systems, and some people are more able to adapt than others, even though we still draw from our past experiences in terms of how we think about investing and if we also might have some bad habits that might not involve enough figuring out what are budget limits are and to make sure that we are not overly gambling or not understanding our cashflows well enough.

If we don't have a good idea for our cashflow 3-6 months into the future, and then we end up overly investing into bitcoin or into something else, then we might end up putting too much stress upon ourselves when our cashflow shortage comes later down the road, and we are not really sure from where it came (except if we would have planned in advance, we would have already been able to see how our income versus expenses were lining up and maybe we even have various cushions in our accounts that end up serving as the places in which we draw from for investing, so for example, if we are young and have hardly any responsibilities, then we might maintain at least a $500 cushion in our account at all times, and we can see the times of the month in which our various cashflows are close to the cushion. and maybe much of the month we have $2k to $5k extra, but every once in a while it we can see it gets close to the cushion so we make sure that we take measures to never go below that particular cushion.

If our finances are  more complicated with family obligations, business expenses, and even uncertainties of income, we might try to create a cushion that never goes below $3k... so yeah we realize if at any point we end up going below $3k, we are in a real bad place, so we have to scramble a bit to get it back above $3k, so the one with a cash cushion of $3k, might have regular cash balances that are in the $5k to $10k territory, but they can project ahead and see that each month they get close to $3k, and so they can use those kinds of balances to figure out how much they are able to invest and when to authorize their abilities to invest.. whether weekly, monthly or some other time period.


DCA is buying based on your own budget, and buying the dip is buying the dip. They are different, and even if you might be at a point that you have accumulated quite a bit of BTC and you feel that you prefer to buy on dips rather than DCA, those kinds of decisions should be based on your own sense of whether you have accumulated enough BTC, and sometimes the BTC price action might inspire you to buy more or to buy less, but those likely are luxuries that come from having had already accumulated a decent amount of BTC so that you are already feeling sufficiently/adequately prepared for up.


Corrections do not "always" happen in the way that you are describing, yet each of us should always be prepared (psychologically and financially) for corrections to happen whether they end up happening or not.


Yes.. .We do not want to prepare for only one direction, even though ONLY 1 direction might end up happening, but we are prepared for either.

One thing about preparing for UP, an overwhelming majority of the persons of the world are not even close to sufficiently/adequately prepared for UP, so any of us who prepare for UP are going to be way more advantaged over them, and we are also going to be advantaged because we are prepared for both up and for down, and many of the persons of the world are also not prepared for down because they are not prepared to buy BTC when (or if) the BTC price goes down.. so there is one thing of being prepared to HODL through the down, but there is even a greater bonus to be prepared to buy on the way down (if it goes down), and to have some ideas before the downs happen, at which price points we are going to buy how much BTC... so preparing for UP and for DOWN does better prepare you for UP, too.  


Hopefully if we are trying to accumulate BTC, we are not so dumb as to engage in trading (and/or gambling) tactics because an overwhelming majority of people will be better off to engage in more strict forms of BTC accumulation that includes various kinds of buying of BTC to accumulate more BTC, and selling BTC to accumulate BTC is not a very good practice for the overwhelming number of normal people of the world... in other words trading is a specialized practice and not advisable to do.. especially for beginners to bitcoin, and maybe ONLY once you establish your BTC stash after several years and maybe ONLY less than 10 % of the size of your BTC stash.


DCA and long term HODL go together, but surely anyone is free to sell their BTC at any time that they like, even if selling their BTC might not be a good idea in terms of longer term kinds of financial preparations.


Price is relative, so I doubt that BTC price is too high to perform lump sum or other tactics such as buying on dips, even though DCA can help to mitigate some of the affects of lump sum buying and/or buying on dips if the BTC price moves against what you expect, so if you buy on the dip or lump sum buy and the BTC price goes down, then DCA can help to mitigate the price exposure from having had chosen to engage in such lump sum purchasing of BTC.

Just to let you know, there are likely going to be folks who are new to bitcoin who are going to be buying a lot of BTC, and they are going to want to get exposure quickly rather than over an extended period of time, which is one of the advantages that lump sum (and buying on dip - if the dips happen) can have over the DCA approach to BTC buying.

Even if the BTC price went up 50% to 60% in less than 2 months, that still does not necessarily mean that BTC prices are currently high.  Also, recall BTC prices went up around 3x from their November 2021 bottom, so in about 2 years, but even now, as I type this post, BTC prices are ONLY right around 42% above the 200-week moving average (which is currently $29,634), which is hardly high prices, even if we might end up getting a BTC price correction... but we might not.. There are no guarantees... Historically the BTC price has gotten between 5x to 16x higher than the 200-week moving average, so surely the higher that the BTC price gets above the 200-week moving average, the more we might start to sense that the BTC price is frothy and due for a correction.. and on the short term basis, such corrections may or may not end up happening.


I would consider that there is nothing wrong with keeping a certain amount of money in the bank, including some of your cash reserves, and especially if you have expenses in fiat, then maybe some (or all) of your emergency fund might be in a bank or in several banks or even other kinds of places in which you can access if you need that money.  

Emergency funds should not be in your various investments, but instead various forms of fiat.  Of course, if you get so rich that you have 20-30 times or more of your annual expenses in various investments, then it becomes less critical regarding how well you protect your investments with an emergency fund, but newbie investors need to have an emergency fund to protect their investments, otherwise they could spend 3-10 years investing, and then not getting anywhere because they have to sell their investments at a time that is not of their own choosing because they failed/refused to maintain an adequate emergency fund.

People invest because your money is not likely going to be keeping up with inflation if you are keeping it in various fiat forms, but it still does not mean that you should not be keeping some money in various fiat forms.. even though you are going to get your growth (or even your abilities to keep up with inflation and the degradation of various kinds of fiat) through investing in assets and bitcoin is likely to be a good one (if not the best one) of the choices of where to put extra money.

Sincerely speaking it took me almost an hour to read through and analyze all he had said. I have to go back to the previous conversations and comments he quoted for proper understanding so I won't misquote.

There is a valid point here and a very sound message your passing and I wont be ignorant. It is important that at every point in time. There is a perfect strategy that would be perfect in accumulating bitcoin. But how would we know? This leaves me to adopt the strategy that I can still DCA, and if there is an opportunity to lump sum when the price dips, I wont hesitate to do that. And by anyway it wont hinder my DCA. But this will require enough funds as you have to keep some extra bucks and expect the price to dip while your Dcaing.

Yes, currently Bitcoin transaction fees are still quite expensive. I just checked on Mempool,the lowest fee right now is around $4.52. For investors who like to do DCA with bitcoin with fairly large assets, there will definitely be no problem with these fees. However, for bitcoin investors who have limited capital, the impact will definitely be felt.

Apart from that, I also have an assumption, if bitcoin transaction costs continue to skyrocket and do not decrease in the next few months, perhaps the image of bitcoin will change slightly among small investors. Because for them (small investors), if for example they paid a transaction fee of $5, maybe they would think twice about investing in bitcoin. Because in some countries $5 is quite valuable, and to get it some people have to work all day. So if, for example, it is true that there is play by several parties or several people, I don't think they have thought carefully about the impact. Because instead of continuing to promote Bitcoin's image with the slogan of cheap transaction fees, they instead make transaction fees expensive (if there is a game at all).

However, I also agree with you, that instead of waiting for bitcoin transaction fees to become even cheaper, it is better to continue to set aside cold money to accumulate in bitcoin. Because instead of waiting, it's better to just start and continue (DCA). But on a longer scale in terms of accumulation time. Because maybe all of this happens, (expensive transaction fees) if seen from the positive side it is caused by network congestion. Because maybe the bitcoin halving will be coming soon. Therefore, many people flocked to invest in bitcoin and caused the network to become congested.

But even so, I hope that bitcoin transaction fees can be cheaper as soon as possible.

I am not sure if we can make that general of a statement regarding what a guy should do once he starts to feel that he no longer needs to DCA.. because there can be quite a bit of variance in regards to how much a guy might be cutting out DCA or ONLY doing DCA during certain kinds of BTC price conditions.

Maybe it would be helpful to give a couple of examples?

Hypo 1 (10-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a decently large investment portfolio)
This person might have invested into bitcoin for 1-2 years using DCA method, and maybe even lump sum investing, so maybe has a $750 average cost per BTC, and maybe built up 300 BTC, and so maybe he just plays the waves and feels like he has enough BTC, and accomplished most of his DCA in the first couple years of investing, and maybe will still buy some more BTC from time to time when he perceives the BTC price to be low.. such as near or below the 200-week moving average, other than that he might just be either maintaining his stash and/or cashing out some from time to time.

Hypo 2.  (10-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a medium-sized portfolio)
 Maybe this person was investing $250 per week into bitcoin, and invested around 130k into bitcoin and accumulated near 115 BTC, and maybe in recent times (since around late 2020 and early 2021), this person has been starting to feel like he has enough BTC and that he can perhaps start to cut back on his DCA buying of BTC

Hypo 3 (10-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin without any kind of BTC portfolio), and has been investing $20 to $100 per week into bitcoin, and maybe averaged around $60 per week of BTC, invested nearly $32k into BTC and accumulated nearly 28 BTC.  This person still is not quite sure if he has enough BTC, even though he has been consistently investing into bitcoin for the past 10 years.  

And yeah, maybe we can imagine similar kinds of hypothetical folks with ONLY 5 years of investing into BTC.

Hypo 4 (5-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a decently large investment portfolio)
This person might have invested into bitcoin for 1-2 years using DCA method, and maybe even lump sum investing, so maybe has a $7,000 average cost per BTC, and maybe built up 150 BTC, and so maybe he just plays the waves and feels like he is getting close to having enough BTC, and accomplished most of his DCA in the first couple years of investing, and maybe will still buy some more BTC from time to time when he perceives the BTC price to be low.. such as near or below the 200-week moving average, other than that he might just be either maintaining his stash and/or cashing out some from time to time.

Hypo 5.  (5-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a medium-sized portfolio)
 Maybe this person was investing $1,000 per week into bitcoin, and invested around 260k into bitcoin and accumulated near 20 BTC, and maybe this person is not quite feeling as if he has enough BTC.... but is thinking that he might be getting close to feeling that way in the next year or so.

Hypo 6 (5-year BTC investor who came into bitcoin without any kind of BTC portfolio), and has been investing $100 per week into bitcoin, and maybe invested around $26k into BTC and accumulated nearly 2 BTC.  This person still is considering that he is quite far from having enough BTC, even though he feels pretty comfortable about his investment to date, but he is thinking that he might need to DCA into bitcoin for another 5-10 more years before he starts to feel comfortable, and maybe he is going to need to increase the quantity of his weekly DCA by either increasing income and/or cutting expenses... and he is thinking that he might be able to bring his DCA amount up to $200 or $400 per week and maybe get another 2 or 3 BTC in the next 10 to 15 years or so.

And, part of my point is that the time in which each of these person is going to feel that he has enough BTC is going to differ, and surely there are advantages in regards to having had started accumulated BTC earlier, and it may well be difficult for later comers to catch up.. and even the person with the worst situation (hypo 6) has a pretty decent advantage over a person who is brand new to bitcoin, unless the person comes in and is already able front load the investment and being able to buy a couple of BTC to get caught up to hypo 6.

Edit:  On February 18, 2024 - in this post, I added scenarios for Hypo 7-15 (which largely bring down the timeline with Hypos 7-9 as 2.5 years, Hypos 10-12 1.25 years and Hypos 13-15 newbie status.


These are good points.


I surely have my limits.


I might need to start writing shorter responses, since I am probably repeating myself, anyhow.


I am thinking that part of the solution for the smaller investor would be to leave their BTC on an exchange and with a third party until it reaches a significant enough size, whether that is $200 to $1k would be a discretionary matter, and if he has a lot of UTXOs with small amounts that are $20 to $200, then some of those transactions might be a bit expensive to spend from, in terms of percentages, especially the lower level ones.  It is difficult to give any exact and/or specific answer regarding how small of a UTXO would be acceptable, and if it is at all possible it is probably try to let the smallest of them be in the $500 to $1k arena.. which is currently in the 0.012 to 0.024 (which is 1.2 million to 2.4 million satoshis) arena.


There is also lightning network, and I believe in trying to use somewhat self-custody wallets, such as phoenix, but phoenix has a charge to start a channel that has been between 30k satoshis to 60k satoshis in the last few weeks which is around $13 to $26, and there have been some periods recently in which it was 15k to 25 k to start a channel, which is still $6 to $11... so it would be nice to get back down to those lower costs to start a channel.. even below $5 would be good.. but once the channel is open, then it could be a good place for conducting a lot of transactions for less costs, even though it might be better to charge it up with 1 or 5 million satoshis which is currently $400 to $2k.


Yep. It almost is starting to seem like an attack on bitcoin (or an attack on poor and/or regular people to be able to use the bitcoin blockchain for regular transactions), but it is not very easy to figure out who is buying so many dickbutts or whatever it is that the current transactors (fee bidder-uppers) are supposedly so excited about and buying and transacting with the various JPEGS on the bitcoin blockchain.


I understand that it is easy to get mixed up with the idea of buying on the dip, so then some folks such as you might get caught up on the idea of trading and/or short term periods of getting in and out of bitcoin; however, in this thread, we are not referring to short time periods of trading or getting in and out, but instead ways of accumulating bitcoin, which really it does seem problematic for folks to get caught up on ideas of buying the dip if they may well not really have enough BTC in order to cause that kind of an approach to BTC accumulation to really matter very much -except yeah, the trader thinks about buying on the dip in order to potentially be able to get out, but if you think about your BTC investment in terms of 4-10 years or longer, then you are not necessarily considering trading within the current cycle but holding through more than one cycle.. which likely is going to put you in a better place than any of those folks who are getting in and out of their bitcoin position.. and then run the risk of not accumulating as much bitcoin as you might have been able to and also potentially missing out on the various potential compounding effects of bitcoin investing that more likely come over more than one cycle rather than merely within a possible pump of one cycle.

I had felt how difficult it is to find big Dips when I was still learning to trade (I am still learning now). I made many mistakes in buying large Dips and it was tiring because I had to monitor its movements every day and hour as if what I bought was not enough.

I often encounter prices that I thought were big Dips, which were really big Dips, but it turns out they weren't big Dips, and there were still big Dips next, which turned out to be the lowest price.

However, knowing about DCA made me feel comfortable and not too fixated on price movements. I just need to pay attention to when it's time for me to buy bitcoin. That's why I also suggest the DCA method to my offline friends who want to invest in bitcoin.

JJG teaches many people and explains it well. Yes, we are learning much from him and I thank him because of his explanation.

That's what I'm doing even if I'm married since I regret for not saving bitcoin before while the price is so cheap and don't want this to happen again. Bitcoin right now had so big potential that's why its really good for us to save some for future. Bitcoin future is so good since it already reach on mainstream so I expect that more adoption will happen on it and this halving event would bring a lot of exposure to bitcoin especially if a lot of people see some outstanding price growth of this coin.

But if they can't afford to buy some amount because they think investing or trading it is more convenient to them then I guess what's more ideal there is to separate some part of their profit intended for long term hodl so that they may have some amount to use in future especially if they aim a huge success in future.

It's quite interesting learning this so early as many would have made this same mistake , I believe knowing this will certainly help me a lot, calling it an opportunity of connecting with this forum.

Being in a family way comes with a lot of sacrifices and billing, include the ones you planned and those that happens unexpectedly.
Very disheartening for those who never met Bitcoin during their youthful age and now struggling to keep up with their Bitcoin accumulation. Despite anything, accumulating in fractions is not a bad idea.

Maybe for single people they can budget their monthly income more aggressively in investing in Bitcoin, for example 40% to invest because single people certainly don't have bigger responsibilities in their lives. But if which are married, of course they can invest 10% of the income they get every month in Bitcoin. Because I am also married and budgeting 10% is not too difficult for me because 10% is a savings that we don't touch if our economy gets worse.

And those who are already working, of course, if they are not able to save themselves by setting aside a portion of their income to invest, they will definitely regret it later because they spent money on things that are not useful in their lives, such buying the latest cell phone and other things. I taught some of them in my neighborhood to set aside their money to invest in Bitcoin for their future and yes sometimes they ignored it but yes now they regret it.

Not that I am deviating from this topic but this is one thing that holds some of our ladies remaining single that is wanting to achieve some specific investment or a desired dream before going into family mood. Usually when you work hard you can both achieved them all it depends on your personal arrangements how you wanna plan your life. Investing in bitcoin doesn't have anything connection as family woman or not the purpose of investment is for use after maturity and when there's need for investment and the investment is nor yielding any further results would you be still happy? No but then there's no family attached or involved into it, the main target is just pray for a better investment I have seen some single investment that turns people's life around and, In this you must not think of diversifying your investment to secure your money. A single luck of investment would end your 5 years targets of investment.