WHY the PAIN?!? Could we have avoided it?

Why the pain? Could we have avoided this? Bitcoin's price is probably down from where you bought it for the first time if you bought for the first time in the last 12 months. Is there a way we could avoid something like this? Well, unfortunately, not really. But let me walk you through it in case that's helpful. First of all, the analogy I like is uh you know, I've told you before, I'm happy to be your Bitcoin sherpa. you know, I'm the guy that'll take you to the top of Mount Bitcoin or uh you know, let's call it Mount Everest and make sure you get back down safely with Bitcoin massively amplifying the gains of your investment portfolio or whatever it is you're trying to do. Okay, so let's assume you want to go to the top of Mount Everest. You know, you would not buy Bitcoin unless you were somehow unhappy with something about your world or your investment options or etc. So, you've made that decision. So the equivalent in Mount Everest is so here we are at base camp. You come up to base camp to get acclimated to the altitude and sitting around at base camp. You meet me, I'm your sherpa, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then a snowstorm hits us and we're sitting there, you know, freezing our beehinds off at base camp on Mount Everest. And you start asking all the same questions about that that you would be asking about this, which is the the current dip of the price of Bitcoin. So the first question is, hey, why do I have to experience this? Why couldn't I come up here to base camp after the storm instead of before the storm? I.e., why couldn't I just buy Bitcoin after it dipped instead of before it dipped? Well, the answer to that is we can't predict when dips are coming. We can't predict when snowstorms are coming. So, if you're at base camp on Mount Everest and you get hit by a storm and you're annoyed because the Sherpa should have told you to come after the storm, well, guess what? The Sherpa didn't know the storm was coming. Nobody knew the storm was coming. And if you say just tell me to meet you at base camp on Mount Everest when you're positive there are no storms for the rest of the season, you're never going to go up Mount Everest because you're never going to go to base camp because there is no point at which there is absolute certainty that there will never be any storms anywhere. That's just not a thing. So, okay. So, you're like, "All right, I get it. But could you at least have told me uh you know when the big storms were going to hit?" Well, no, because nobody knows. Nobody knows when Bitcoin is going to drop significantly. Nobody knows if that's going to happen. Nobody knows when that's going to happen. Nobody knows exactly how long it's going to last, even though we have pretty good guesses from past experience. So, all we can do is weather the storm and buy more Bitcoin while it's on sale. That's all we can do. So, again, the analogy over to over to, you know, Mount Everest is, yeah, we go up to base camp and then we weather the storms. When do we go to the top of Mount Everest? When it's not storming. When is that? Well, every storm eventually passes and then we go. It's that simple. It's patience. You weather the storm. Okay. So, more questions people could ask. They could say, "Well, why don't we go after the last storm of the season? Then we don't have to worry about storms. So, just let me know when the last storm of the season has happened and then I'll beat you at base camp." And the answer is no, you won't because we don't know when the last storm of the season is. We have absolutely no way of predicting when the last storm of the season is. And if if you say, "I want to go to base camp to climb Mount Everest only when I'm absolutely certain the last storm of the season uh of the climbing season is behind us," guess what? you're never going to come because we only know that there's not going to be a last storm of the season after the the window of opportunity of the year to climb Mount Everest is behind us. Once the official season is done, then yeah, you know, you don't have to worry about the last storm of the season because the season's over and you missed climbing Mount Everest. So, there's a lot of parallels there where everybody wants to not be in a storm. Everybody wants to buy Bitcoin when it's cheap, not expensive. Everybody wants someone else to let them know when that is. And there's no way around that. And so the alternative is the alternative is to, you know, dollar cost average where you're like, look, I don't want to experience the high the the lows, so I'm going to buy the same amount of Bitcoin every week or every month or, you know, every day, whatever. That's fine, but you're also not going to get the same Mount Everest climbing experience. The research all shows that most of the time, the vast majority of the time, dollar cost averaging underperforms lumpsum purchases. Meaning buying large lump sums of as much Bitcoin as you can and holding on to it for as long as conceivably possible is going to outperform dollar cost averaging the vast majority of the time. Now, not all the time. It is absolutely possible to time it right where you start dollar cost averaging at the right time and you end up ahead of where you would have end up with uh most of the time with lump sum purchasing. But again, that requires predictions. That requires knowing when the 12% of the time is that it's better to dollar cost average or the 17% of the time when it's better to dollar cost average. We don't know. What we do know is it takes a lot of the variability and uncertainty out, but that is at the price of significantly reducing the amount of economic upside. So, you know, my assumption as your Bitcoin sherpa is that you want to maximize your upside. And in order to maximize your up upside, that is going to require some pain. It means we're going to meet at base camp. It means we're going to get hit by weather sometimes. It means we're going to try to climb Mount Everest every chance we get. It also means sometimes the climbs up Mount Everest that we thought were going to be epic and amazing turn out to not be epic and amazing because we get hit by a storm and we're stuck going back down to base camp instead of up to Mount Everest. So, do I want to be at $64,000 per coin? No. $64,000 per coin is no fun. Um, but I had no way of predicting we were going to be here. Nobody does. Um, the good news is I think James Czech, who's my favorite Bitcoin analyst and the only one in my opinion really worth listening to, he would say if this is not the bottom, it's probably within 10% of the bottom. You know, the lowest price Bitcoin is likely to ever go is probably no lower than 10% lower than it's been in the last 24 hours. Um, but maybe to maybe right now is the bottom. We don't know. It's it's like in a storm on Mount Everest base camp where somebody is saying, "Well, at least tell me when the storm is over, so at least I'll know. I don't have to worry about it because the storm is abading." The problem is we also don't know that because many storms start and then they look like they're about to go away and then the real storm hits you and the real storm is ends up being worse, which is what happened. You know, Bitcoin price uh dropped down into the 80,000s. A lot of people, including me, thought that there was a good chance that the 80,000s was the bottom and then it drops into the 60s. That's no fun. Nobody could have predicted that that was going to happen. I don't know. James Czech doesn't know. Nobody knows. We can know based on historical patterns and probabilities that it is highly likely that if we're not at the bottom now that we are very close to the bottom just based on statistical probabilities of past Bitcoin price dips. You know, same with our Mount Everest experience of uh you know, so snowstorms, we can say, okay, the average snowstorm on Mount Everest lasts so long and we're on the you know, most of the way through that period, which means the remainder of the storm is not likely to last more than some series of months, whatever it is. We also we also know that the average storm only gets so bad. And we know that of the so bad that you know the price dip could be, we're through the vast majority of that. Now, does it mean we couldn't can't possibly drop another 10%. We could, but we're real close to the lowest we are likely to drop. And maybe we have already dropped to the lowest that we are likely to drop. And maybe 60,000 that we hit a few weeks ago was the lowest we'll ever see again. We don't know. Nobody knows. But that is why there's just no way around it. You want to go up Mount Everest and have Bitcoin change your life? Yeah, there there's going to be some storms along the way. If you want to be the lucky hiker that doesn't experience any storms, there's no way around that. There's no way anybody can predict in advance a a mechanism by which you are guaranteed to never experience a storm. There's just not. So, here we are. Bitcoin's dipping. It's on sale. The price dips suck. And then everybody eventually wishes they had bought way more and the price dips. And then eventually people wish they had bought way more at any price before or after the price dip because in the rearview mirror far enough in the future, all the prices look really cheap. The ones at the peak tip top and the ones in the trough, they all look cheap if you go in far enough into the future. The same will be true this time. So you'll be fine. We're fine. Most importantly, nothing's out of the ordinary. Nothing that bit Bitcoin is doing now is not something it hasn't done half a dozen or a dozen times before. This is much less painful than historical bare markets because Bitcoin's a lot bigger now. It's bigger. It's got the Bitcoin ETFs. There's just a lot more bulk to the Bitcoin marketplace. There's a lot more users. There's a lot more liquidity. It's just, you know, it's a lot less volatile than it used to be. Um, so this one is already, you know, a mini bear instead of a brutal bear. Um, but nothing Bitcoin is doing. It hadn't done a dozen or half a dozen to a dozen or more times. It's fine. It's going to be fine. It's always fine. So, sit tight. You'll be good. Let me know if you have questions. Always here to serve.