When I started investing in Bitcoin ( BTC -0.09% ), I had the preconception that I must also learn to trade. It took me three years to learn that this is not the case. Not only am I not a trader, but I am a really bad trader. Anytime I’ve tried, it has ended somewhat catastrophically because I let my emotions govern my trading decisions.
Any professional trader will tell you to write down a system of trading rules and abide by them. Even though I had the right advice, applying the advice properly was an entirely different problem. Eventually, I settled on the conclusion that I shouldn’t trade.
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Have a long time horizon
Part of what I found stressful about trying to trade Bitcoin was the short-term volatility. I was too pessimistic about downtrends and too optimistic about uptrends. In other words, when Bitcoin was going up, I thought it was going to the moon. When Bitcoin was going down, I thought it was headed straight for zero. Although I think I’m through this phase of naïveté, I still think my emotions have the ability to affect my decision-making skills if I were to try trading again. This is why I’ve opted to keep a long time horizon with respect to investing in Bitcoin.
In some sense, I started with the understanding that Bitcoin is a long-term investment. When I first bought Bitcoin in 2015, I said I would never sell it as an experiment to see how large that investment could grow. I never imagined that the investment would do as well as it has. Now I have the same outlook on Bitcoin’s future today at $40,000 as I did in 2015 when Bitcoin was $500. It is at least a decade-long investment, and Bitcoin investors are still early. I don’t need to take the risk of trading Bitcoin in the short term to increase my gains because my gains will be large enough to satisfy me if I simply wait long enough.
I hold the belief that everyone investing in Bitcoin in 2022 is still early. This is because I also believe we’re early to today’s version of internet itself. So what then does the future hold for Bitcoin? What is its potential for growth in the future?
The future of Bitcoin
Admittedly, it wouldn’t make sense for me to consider Bitcoin a long-term investment if I didn’t think it would be around 10 or 20 years from now. I first had to convince myself that Bitcoin was here to stay. After looking into how it was designed, built, maintained, and run, I haven’t been able to articulate a reasonable set of circumstances in which Bitcoin falls apart. So there is sound logic behind why Bitcoin will be around in one capacity or another in the future.
Given that the cryptocurrency network on which Bitcoin resides is here to stay, where does the price go? Is it in store for more parabolic growth? Or is the growth going to be more modest from here on out? The third option is that Bitcoin slowly fades into obscurity throughout the coming years. I think the more likely scenario is that the number of people using Bitcoin around the world will continue to rise. As the user base grows, so will demand. Since Bitcoin’s supply is strictly limited to 21 million tokens, a brief analysis of the supply and demand suggests that the price of Bitcoin is likely to increase in the future. I think there is a solid case to make that Bitcoin rises to at least the market cap of gold, which is $12 trillion, from today’s $800 billion. Beyond that is anyone’s best guess, and investors will have to take it one block at a time.
This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the “official” recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. We’re motley! Questioning an investing thesis – even one of our own – helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.
