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It’s 6 am. Your alarm clock is ringing. In today’s ultra-connected world, I’m pretty sure you use your smartphone as your alarm clock.
So you grab your smartphone to turn off the alarm clock. Your first instinct is to unlock your smartphone and launch your favorite app: the one that lets you know the price of Bitcoin in real-time.
For some, this will mean going to CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko.
You are obsessed with the price of Bitcoin
Either way, your first thought upon waking up is to check the price of Bitcoin. You want to know if you missed anything overnight. Maybe Elon Musk tweeted while you were sleeping, causing the price of Bitcoin to crash or soar.
You need to know immediately.
After checking the Bitcoin price, you realize that after 7–8 hours of sleep, not much has changed. Most of the time, the variations during this short period of time are very small. Nevertheless, you wanted to be reassured.
You actually get out of bed after losing 5 to 10 minutes in this operation. In the meantime, I imagine you will also check your email and some Bitcoin news sites. I’m not blaming you, because I followed this pattern for a long time in my early days in the Bitcoin world.
You’re going to take a shower, then you’re going to make your breakfast. As you sip your morning black coffee, you still have your smartphone in hand. You take a closer look at how much money in U.S. dollars you hold in Bitcoin.
You may know that Bitcoin is a long-term monetary revolution, but you can’t help it.
Checking the price of bitcoin daily is totally useless, as Bitcoin’s goals are long-term
If you recognize yourself in what I have just described, you will probably continue throughout the day to look at the price of Bitcoin frequently. You end up obsessing.
This attitude is totally counterproductive and above all unnecessary, as I will explain in the following.
Bitcoin is a free market. In fact, it is the only truly free market in the world. In fact, the volatility of the Bitcoin price is a feature, not a bug. You can’t have any short-term guarantees on the price of Bitcoin. A free market will react more violently to investors’ emotions than the stock market, which is totally manipulated with circuit breakers acting as lifelines.
With Bitcoin, the guarantees are long-term. You have guarantees on the fundamentals of Bitcoin:
- A hard-capped supply of 21 million units no matter what.
- A programmatic monetary policy.
- The three great freedoms that Bitcoin offers.
- A transparent, decentralized, permissionless system.
- No one can stop you from using your Bitcoin as you wish as long as you have the associated private keys.
You know that 1 BTC today will still be equal to 1 BTC in 21 million units in 10, 20, or 50 years.
You need to take a step back and focus on the long term with Bitcoin
So you can save your money without the risk of inflation working against you as with the current system. No one can censor you either. The fruits of your labor stored within the Bitcoin system are totally protected.
The fundamentals of Bitcoin make it the hardest money in the world. In the coming years, more and more people will come to buy Bitcoin to protect themselves from the flaws of the current system. So the Bitcoin revolution will take time to fully triumph.
So you need to be patient. That means becoming a Bitcoin HODLer for at least 10 years. That’s the bare minimum to really enjoy Bitcoin.
From this point on, there is no need to look at the Bitcoin price every day at every moment. The price will go up and down, but in the long run, it will only go up because of the design of the Bitcoin system, which is a NgU (“Number Go Up”) technology.
Those who are patient are always rewarded with Bitcoin.
Detaching yourself from the Bitcoin price in the short term will help you avoid FOMO or FUD feelings
Constantly looking at the price of Bitcoin and therefore what you own in BTC is as pointless as constantly looking at the price of your house several times a day. When you move in, you are not going to move out for several years. So you have no interest in looking every morning at how much your house is worth on the real estate market.
Instead, you detach yourself from that price and enjoy your life to the fullest.
You need to do the same with Bitcoin. Buy your Bitcoin, then send it to cold storage and forget about it for years to come. The day you really need to use some of the fruits of your labor, you can then come and look at the price of Bitcoin.
Until then, be patient. Continue to learn more about Bitcoin and the economy, while leaving the price of Bitcoin alone in the morning when you wake up and throughout the day.
Those who do this are much more zen. Most importantly, they don’t fall into the trap of FOMO or FUD. They make decisions with their logical thinking, not by giving in to their emotions. This is the best way to make winning investments in life.
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