If it were 2011, I would give you the same advice about Bitcoin as today

It is 2011 and you and I are talking about Bitcoin. What do I tell you about Bitcoin? In retrospect, I would tell you exactly the same thing today that I would tell you back then, which is buy as much Bitcoin as you can and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. Now, how is it possible that the same advice in 2011 is the same advice for today? Let's walk through each element and I'm going to tell you why that's the right recommendation then and why it's the recommend first recommendation now. First of all, let's assume the price is five cents or whatever the price started 2011. It was super low. So the price is on its way from 5 cents up to $32, but we don't know it's going to go to $32. Let's say I can tell you with certainty it'll go to $69,000, which was the price earlier today. So, I can tell you with certainty the price is going to 69,000, but that's all I know about Bitcoin is that it's going to be $69,000 at some point in the future. Okay. So, here we are. We're talking about Bitcoin. The price is ripping from 5 cents up to $32. First thing when I tell you about Bitcoin, you don't believe me. You think it's, you know, funny money on the internet, blah blah blah. So, you don't listen. You don't listen. The price goes from $1, $2, $5, $10, $20. Finally, when it's $30, you're like, I can't take it anymore. The price is going crazy. It's running away from me. Joel keeps telling me to buy as much Bitcoin as I can and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. The price has gone from 5 cents to $30 and boom, you make your very first big Bitcoin buy at $30 per Bitcoin. And then it goes to $32 and you feel like a genius because it's still going up. And then it crashes to $2, which is what actually happened. The price in 2011 rocketed up to $32 and then crashed in either late 2011 or I think it was 2012. I guess it was 2012, crashed to $2. Now, you are going to come back to me at that point and say, Joel, you told me to buy as much Bitcoin as I could and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. I bought it at $30. It went to 32 and now it's at $2. It's dropping $10, $6, $5, $4, $3. What should I do? My advice, buy as much Bitcoin as you can and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. Now, your response to that is, but wait, you told me to do that when it was $30 and I did. And then I bought a bunch of $30 Bitcoin that I'm stuck with and now the price is only five bucks. My answer would be, "Yeah, but you didn't know that was going to happen." And I didn't know that was going to happen. Michael Sailor didn't know that was going to happen. Lyn Alden didn't know that was going to happen. Andreas Antonopoulos, you know, uh, none of these people. None of these people knew that was going to happen. So that's why the advice is the same, which is buy as much Bitcoin as you can and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. Well, of course you're unhappy because you have $30 Bitcoin and the price is now $5, $4, $3. So, do you buy more? No matter what I tell you, the answer is probably no, because you're annoyed that you have $30 Bitcoin and you think it's going to zero. In fact, not only do you think it's going to zero, but everybody thinks it's going to at least a dollar. Everyone's certain that because it started at 5 cents and rocketed up to $32 and it's falling like a rock that it's headed for $1. Everybody agrees $1. Nobody, only idiots would buy Bitcoin for more than a dollar because the price is falling so fast. So, everyone has agreed that they're going to buy Bitcoin when it's below a dollar. And guess what? The price never goes to a dollar. It stops at $2. $2 is the lowest it ever gets in 2012. And then it climbs back up. Well, it climbs and it climbs and it climbs and eventually it goes past the $30 you paid. And what do you do? Well, as it races past $30 on its way to $1,200, eventually you buy yourself some more Bitcoin. Now, did you buy it for less than $30? Probably not, because again, you thought you were underwater. You thought it was going to zero. Everybody you were listening to on Twitter was saying it was going to $1 and it stopped at $2. So even if you were going to buy Bitcoin, you always thought you were going to buy it cheaper than the price it ever went. So there it goes. You buy yourself some $45 Bitcoin, some $50 Bitcoin, some $100 Bitcoin. Now at some point you and I meet up again 2012 and you're like, Joel, I bought a bunch of dollar, you know, Bitcoin at $30 and then I bought some more at $45, but I'm annoyed that I didn't buy any Bitcoin at $2. My response, you didn't know it was going to go to $2. I didn't know it was going to go to $2. Everybody thought it was going to rocket to, you know, some ridiculously high number super super fast. Nobody thought it was going to stop at $32 and go back down to $2 before it went to $1,200. Nobody knew that. You didn't know it. I didn't know it. Okay, but you're like, "Yeah, but Joel, why did you tell me to buy as much as I could and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible? Why didn't you tell me to dollar cost average DCA?" And my answer would be because all the research says that dollar cost averaging in the long term has a lower return pretty profoundly lower return than just lump sum purchasing which is buying as much upfront as you can. And you're like yeah but I could have dollar cost averaged all the way through the dip. But the problem is you have a problem which is okay if you want a dollar cost average. How are you going to do that? What percent of your money? Let's say you have $10,000 back then. What percent of that 10,000 are you going to put in right away, which goes in at $30. And what percent are you going to dollar cost average over time? Well, of course, you don't know. It's going to be zero upfront, 50% upfront, 10% upfront, 20% upfront. You don't know. I don't know. The problem is there's no good answer to that question. Then the follow-up question, of course, is if you dollar cost average through that dip down to $2, guess what? You're probably going to keep, first of all, the first thing you're going to happen is you're going to turn the dollar cost average off as the price falls. Why are you going to do that? Because that's what everybody does. They say, "Hey, I'm going to dollar cost average all the way through the bare market." And that way I'll get a bunch of super cheap prices. But the truth is, as the price falls and as it grinds down there for a while, people turn off the dollar cost averaging. They're like, "Why am I buying this thing that's going to zero? This makes no sense." So they turn it off. So prob probabilities are you would have turned off your dollar cost averaging and not bought a bunch of cheap Bitcoin. But even if you did, even if you said, "I'm going to dollar cost average for a couple years." Guess what? It didn't stay down that that low very long. Relatively quickly, Bitcoin came back and passed $32 a coin. Meaning, if you were dollar cost averaging, now you're dollar cost averaging above the price you could have gotten if you had just bought in up front. Okay? So that's why I recommend buying as much as you can and holding on to it for as long as conceivably possible because there's not a good alternative. It's the advice I would have given in 2011 because there's not better advice. Would you have eventually been happy you bought $30 Bitcoin? Yes. Will you have wished that you bought Bitcoin for less in the dip? Yes. Just just like there's a ton of people that are going to wish they had bought a lot more Bitcoin below $70,000. But it's their first bare market. And in their first bare market, they're scared. They're nervous. They already feel bad about being underwater on their first Bitcoin purchase back in 2025. And so, are they buying more in the dip? No. Because they think they got in at the end of the party. They missed the boat. The party's over. You know, all of those things, right? That's how they feel. And when that's how you feel, you tend to not want to buy more of that same asset. So again, at some point you come back to me, you know, the price is $1,200 in 2013, and you're like, "Joel, why didn't you just tell me to like, how could you have told me to buy as much Bitcoin as I could and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible? These price swings are insane." My response would be, "Yeah, but nobody knows that. We know it's volatile, which I've told you a million times. We don't know where the tops and bottoms are. We don't know if buying at $30 per Bitcoin is the same as buying at 30 cents. Like when the price rose from five cents to 30 cents, what if you were waiting for a price correction, you're like, I've seen this before. I heard Bitcoin is volatile. It's gone from 5 cents to 30 cents. I'm going to wait for 20 cents. Never happened. Guess what? You never would have bought the Bitcoin. What if it, you know, when it's rocketing up again? You're waiting for $1 Bitcoin. Never happened. Okay. What if it rockets up as it did to $32, comes down to $2, and then it goes to $1,200, and you're like, "Dang it, if it ever gets back to $30 or $45 or any of those original prices I paid, I'm going to buy more." Guess what? When it came down from $1,200, the lowest it ever got was $92. So, everybody that was waiting for Bitcoin to go below $92 never bought any. But again, it was the same thing. And I went through the exact same cycle. So, I bought my first Bitcoin at $12,600. Exactly 10% of the of the current all-time high of 126. Exactly 10% of that, $12,600. So, I buy Bitcoin at 12,600. Promptly, the price drops. I buy some more on the way down, but not nearly enough. It bottoms, you know, at a price that I promised myself I would buy more, but don't. And finally, I buy Bitcoin at a lot higher prices. And I wish back then in 2017 and 2018, I had my very own Bitcoin Sherpa. I wish there was somebody there in 2017, 2018, 2019 for me telling me, Joel, buy as much Bitcoin as you can and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible because that was the right advice for me back then. But nobody was there to tell me that. So, I was on my own. So, I'm here to tell you that's the my advice. buy as much Bitcoin as you can. Hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible because it was the right advice from the day Bitcoin launched on April sorry on January 3rd of 2009. It was the right advice from the very first day Bitcoin launched on January 3rd of 2009. It is the right advice today. In that process, you will buy Bitcoin at high prices. You will buy it at low prices. You will buy it at medium prices. Numerous people will miss out waiting for prices that never come. Numerous people will freak out and panic sell on the way down, which I never did, thankfully, but some people do. Some people will. Don't do that. And the advice is just the same. There's no way around it. Avoid avoid debt. Don't get yourself upside down on a Bitcoin backed loan that you can't repay. Don't borrow against anything that is marked to market, meaning you can get a a margin call. So, don't borrow against stocks. Don't borrow against bonds. Don't borrow against Bitcoin. Uh don't do any of that sort of stuff unless you know how to handle that sort of stuff and almost nobody does. So don't do it. Uh again, buy as much Bitcoin as you can with money that you have and hold on to it for as long as conceivably possible. It's just always been the right answer. And even if we're in 2011 and the only thing we know is the price is ripping from 5 cents to eventually 17 I guess 15 years later, 15 years from 2011 to the present. Even if all we know about Bitcoin is that it's going to go from whatever 10 bucks or whatever it started in 2011. Uh it was even lower than that. It was way lower. But anyway, whatever it was, whatever the price was at 2011, even if we all we knew was the price was going to go from there to at some point in the future $69,000, the advice stays the same. It just stays the same. It's the only thing that actually works in the long term. And it's the advice I would have given you in 2011. And it's the advice I'm giving you now. Even though this is not legal, financial, accounting, you know, investment advice, it's none of those advices. It's just one random person on the internet sharing an opinion. So, do your own research. Consult a professional. Flex.