Congratulations to all of my fellow rat poison enthusiasts who successfully held through the Dark Winter of Doubt (also known as “2018-2020”). Kennedy declared in 1961 that he would have a man on the Moon by end of the decade. Let me declare that bitcoin will be far beyond “the Moon” by the end of this decade.
I’ve lately become a lot less interested in evangelizing or defending cryptocurrency to the skeptics in my life. I’ve spent a solid half-decade casting pearls; at this point you either get it or you don’t.
Obviously there are still massive UX challenges in crypto. Exorbitant gas prices on the Ethereum network continue to intrude on the little guy’s ability to swap ERC-20s or interact with smart contracts. Last month I had to spend well over $100 in Ethereum gas fees to end a number of altcoin stakes that I set up the previous year. At each step of the process I questioned whether I was doing things correctly or whether I was recklessly burning through my gains in order to secure needlessly faster transaction speeds for myself. That experience sucks, and it won’t scale. But it’s not a death knell any more than ARPANET’s complexity was a harbinger of doom for Netscape.
We are still early. We are still early early. Did you see yesterday’s news that U.S. federal banks are now allowed to use stablecoins? We are so early you can’t even imagine it.
You shouldn’t expect the “financial advisor” at your hometown bank to recommend that you invest in crypto any more than you would have expected the store managers at Blockbuster to advise you to jump ship for Netflix. Every meteor is going to displace a few dinosaurs. (And until that day comes, nothing is preventing the dinosaurs from enjoying their 0.1% APY or whatever the CDs are paying nowadays.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most people who regularly send and receive email cannot explain what TCP/IP or IMAP are, and yet every day they manage to successfully use technology that relies on those protocols. Why insist on understanding “what gives bitcoin value” before pulling the trigger on a provably resilient investment? Bro, you don’t need to understand blockchain in order for blockchain to take off.
My advice (this is not official financial advice; I’m not a licensed advisor; you must do your own research; blah blah blah) to anyone interested in crypto has always been to pick a safe project you believe in (read: BTC) and set up an automatic weekly buy on Coinbase. $10 a week. $50 a week. $5 a week. An amount that to you is negligible but non-trivial. Don’t even look at the price of one full coin when you do it.
What you don’t want to do: wait for the “perfect” moment on the price chart and then dump a life-altering amount of money into it all at once. What you really don’t want to do: day trade.
Buy and hold. That’s it. That’s literally all you have to do.
“But when should I sell?”
Sell? Hahaha.
Josh Anderson 