That's one thing I don't get about crypto, like BTC. Are you using it for a store of value, or for purchasing power in the future?
For example, if BTC is today worth 10K per, and you buy a $30K USD car from a dealer accepting BTC as payment, you give them 3 BTC, or $30K USD. Easy, painless.
But in a week, BTC is now worth $20K per. So you could have had that same car for 1.5 BTC, or 30K USD. Would you not be kicking yourself in the butt for not waiting a week, so your BTC was worth more?
Of course it goes the other way...Where if the BTC value dropped to 5K per, you would be spending 6 BTC to get that car, or the same 30K USD. So you would be patting yerself on the back for not waiting.
How can you crypto guys handle that sort of dichotomy without driving yerself nuts? Heh.
These are good questions, yea, store of value, but I think what's more accurate in my case is a speculative investment.
Let's simplify the example as I don't know a car-dealership that accepts bitcoin (I'm sure there's a few, but anyway...). Say you need to go on an emergency trip to London from San Francisco tonight but you're fully invested in the stock market (FANG stocks) and don't have enough cash to cover the $5,000 airfare and hotel costs for a week. Naturally, you'll charge it on a CC and sell some of your AAPL holdings, and wait for ACH transfer to your bank and pay off the CC balance. (or you can have a CC issued by your broker, I wouldn't know anything about it, but it was mentioned here).
With cryptos, things are a lot more expedient, you can use bitcoin at cheapair.com and complete the transaction, no need to wait for ACH or CC to finalize the transaction. It's a little bit more complex if you're not holding bitcoins but another cryptocurrency, you'll have to exchange for bitcoin or another coin accepted at cheapair.com and if you're cautious like me, you'll do the exchange at $1K clips so it could be 2-3 hours, depends on how soon you need to get to the airport, in this particular case, I may do it in one shot so 30-45 minutes max.
In both cases, you sold $5K worth of investments, so if APPL doubles in price in a couple of days because Bill Gates wants to take it private to honor Steve Jobs at double the price, you lost "potential profits", that's the same thing with bitcoin, except bitcoin/cryptos by nature is very volatile, so it does happen where it can double in a short time, but also the same thing on the downside.
How do I handle not driving myself nuts? I went through the crypto bear market of 2014-16 experience and very lucky to have cashed out many times my original $ investment in late 2017/early 2018 so everything is "house money", but.... I was asked once by Maverick74 (he's a great guy, wish he would post again on ET) when I made a comment about getting nervous as btc was going below $5K, and yea, i get affected by the swings.
I look at crypto exchange rates a few hundred times a day, and even in the middle of the night, since this is 24/7/365, but I always tell myself it's long term holding.
I posted here that I was increasing the crypto portfolio allocation middle of last year to 100% Tezos/xtz and it was around $1.70, anyone who followed that as a recommendation saw their investment lose more than half as xtz went to about $0.80 (actually my portfolio went below 6 figures $-wise) and it hurt big time, and it lingered to about $1 level for a long time but now it's about $2.75. There's a nice trick to holding xtz, unlike holding a coin like btc, i get dividend-income every 2.8 days and that's what I "spend" every month and reported as tax income, but the portfolio is not touched, so it's great the income in $ is much higher every month and portfolio $ value is also much higher, I used to remember holding bitcoin and other PoW coins like Monero and all you can hope for is for price to go up to make yourself feel better and when they go down, you start drinking (j/k)
I believe that this year will be a bull market for bitcoin/cryptos and if bitcoin goes to ATH, and with xtz outperforming btc, I'm hoping to hit 7 figures $ value on my crypto portfolio, if not, it's ok, too. People who got extremely rich in bitcoin or ethereum? Yea, I'm sure they had to endure the wild price swings, many, many people sold eth when it went from $2 to $20 and missed out when it went to top $1400 (although it's about $220 at the moment), probably same when bitcoin hit $100 and many sold everything they had as they got them for pennies.