My advice for people new to Bitcoin

1. Immediately set an automatic weekly recurring payment of ~ $15 to buy Bitcoin
2. Don’t cancel the above payment and never sell your Bitcoin no matter what happens.
3. Don’t buy altcoins.

The above is the advice I have for 99% of people, it boils down to these 3 points. This simple yet highly effective strategy would now be worth over $100,000 if done consistently over the last 5 years. No, it’s not too late to get started! Much more on each point below.

1. The best way to make money from Bitcoin is “Time in the market” not “Timing the market”. I write this as the Bitcoin price is $57,871. When looking at this people often hope for a drop to $40,000 at which point they assure themselves they will buy-in. What happens, in reality, is either the price never goes back to that point or it does drop to that point and the would-be buyer then thinks it will drop more or is now scared to buy because this recent drop to $40,000 looks like the start of a crash. In the short term anything can happen, yes you could start buying at $57,871 and the price drops tomorrow to $40,000, however with a long term time horizon (5 years minimum), which is certainly something you should have with bitcoin, the price will always increase over the long term. If over the short term the price does drop then great, your $15 a week is buying more, if the price rises then it’s also great because you have made money already. I know several people who have been hovering over the buy button since the price was $4,000 but never clicked. They want to buy a bigger position with the intention of timing the market. Analysis paralysis kicks in and they never actually buy, if they had just set up a weekly $15 payment then they would have a sizable position by now. $15 is an approximate amount to aim for but it depends greatly on your income and circumstances. I would try to get this number as high as possible but without it being too high that it becomes a burden and you have to cancel it, it is important you can set and forget. If you do have a lump sum to be able to invest, then invest part of it but use the rest to bump up your weekly payment. It might turn out that the price just goes up from where you first bought it, and it would have made sense to just put it all in. You can never know what’s going to happen though and holding back a bit protects you in case it does drop straight after buying. You may feel sure you will be ok but emotions can easily take over if your position loses 40% of its value.

2. Don’t cancel your recurring payment, as described above it should be an amount you can just forget about. By doing this, after some time you will have a significant position. It totally depends on when you enter the market. Bitcoin tends to move in 3 stages over 4-year cycles, it has an aggressive upwards phase, (bull market), a brutal prolonged drop (bear market) and an accumulation zone. If you join in a bull market, as is currently the case you will be rewarded within a couple of months. However, turbulence and volatility along the way are still to be expected and 30-40% short term drops are still possible and normal in this phase, get used to them. This is another reason to not just wade in with a huge initial position. Most people can not stomach a £10,000 position turning to £6,500 overnight, hence the reason for the slow and steady weekly approach. If you join in a bear market or accumulation zone then expect your $ value to continually drop or not move much, this may be disheartening but the best way to get through this is to take comfort in knowing your Bitcoin balance is continually increasing. Each month you are getting more and more for your money, it’s a sale that just gets better and better. When the bull market eventually comes back you have a sizable amount of Bitcoin and will enjoy the ride up much more. At that point, you will even wish the price stayed lower for longer to allow you to buy more. This is easier said than done of course because you do need to have that belief that the next bull run will come and that the price will shoot up again. This is where getting a better understanding of Bitcoin helps enormously. I have many good sources, some of which I will list at the end. Eventually, you will get to the point where you value the Bitcoin much more than you do the $. I suggest a 5+ year time horizon as this gives enough time to see your investments come good. Anything shorter could leave you selling at an 80% loss only to watch the price go 20 times higher within a year of you selling. This is why you should never sell, just simply buy, hold and wait even if the price drops 80%. Some people will try to time the 4-year cycle, some may get it right and do very well but most will fuck it up. Even professional traders managing $billions are only right 55-65% of the time, which is enough for them to turn a profit but it shows that even the best regularly make mistakes. If you are an average Joe there is an almost certain chance you will lose money trying to time the market, unless you are exceptionally lucky. So when can you sell, after 5 years? Maybe, but hear me out. As I said though, with enough knowledge you won’t want to sell, for me it would be like selling my seat on a life raft of the Titanic, complete insanity. You can benefit from your investment in Bitcoin long term earning a yield, which is similar to a bank interest payment but higher, currently about 6% Alternatively use it as collateral for cash, a business, dividend stocks etc. Most property billionaires never sell their property, they use it as collateral to draw cash. The amount of property they have will always grow this way, the cash they draw will always lose value compared to the underlying asset. This is thanks to central banks inflating, (devaluing) the money supply. This way their net worth continually grows, without selling anything. Owners of large companies do similar things, Zuckerberg does not sell his FB shares, he uses them as collateral to get $. Spend the devaluing $, £ or Euro and keep the income-producing, appreciating asset. The same applies to Bitcoin investing, keep the scarce, appreciating asset and spend the devaluing $, that you can get by using Bitcoin as collateral. Also selling Bitcoin, shares or property is subject to capital gains tax. Directly selling your asset incurs a tax bill whereas the perfectly legal methods used by billionaires do not, you can and should use this method also. If you have to sell, make sure it is after many years and don’t just be happy with a doubling, Bitcoin has great long term potential, doubling your money would be selling yourself very short, many people have made this mistake also and regret it dearly. More importantly, get mentally prepared for the big price drops. DO NOT panic sell them when they come. You only lose money when you crystalise it and make the sale, just wait it out. Nobody likes to lose money but the weekly amount you invest should be an amount you can afford to lose. It’s best to just see it as lost until the price recovers. Watch out for Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). The same shit the mainstream media puts out circulates every few years, it is just dressed up slightly different. Maybe it is a major country “banning” Bitcoin or that Bitcoin is an environmental disaster or perhaps some influential finance “expert” or “economist” is criticising it. More often than not all these criticisms have a robust counter-argument, again when you acquire enough knowledge for yourself you will see through all of the bullshit. You will also learn to value Bitcoin from its fundamentals not just its present market price. It’s not uncommon for powerful or influential people to drop some bad news in the media about Bitcoin, to then behind closed doors, scoop it up cheaper after their news crashed the price by 10%.

3. There are thousands of alternative cryptocurrencies also known as altcoins or shitcoins. They often offer faster, cheaper payments and are not harmful to the environment. Perhaps they offer features that Bitcoin does not. Most new people to Bitcoin go through stages, it starts with Bitcoin then goes to an interest in altcoins then eventually back to Bitcoin. Again as mentioned many times this is a learning process and knowledge is key here. It took me a couple of years to start understanding this, but hopefully, I can save you some money while you learn. Altcoins can be very tempting, they have brilliant well-funded marketing teams and as I said all of these benefits seem to make them look better than Bitcoin. Not to mention they can explode in value 1000x. It’s important to know that Bitcoin is not competing with PayPal or Visa it’s competing with the central banks of the world. That’s to say Bitcoin does not need to be a payment mechanism that you use to buy a pint or a coffee. Bitcoin is money, money is supposed to be something that you store your time and energy with, ie. you earn value from work or other sources and want to save it for future consumption. A plumber, nurse or truck drive should not have to be a property or stock trader just to preserve the value of their work. We all intuitively know that if we saved 1 weeks wage from 25 years ago it would not buy half the things that it would today. So what happening here, is it that almost every single price is going up despite technology, automation and mass production making production thousands of times cheaper and easier? No, the common denominator here is the government-issued money ie. £, $ or Euro. It’s the value of the $ that is decreasing every year not that prices go up every year. Another way to think of this if you had a fixed-length ruler that had 30cm marked on it and then used this to measure a house, then you may find that the house is 900cm wide. Now let’s inflate the unit of length, the cm. We now squeeze in another 10cm to our ruler which is still the same actual length as it was before but now the numbers show that the ruler goes up to 40cm, of course, the length of the cm has to shrink to achieve this. We measure our house again and find that it is now 1200cm wide. Did the house magically grow? No, we just fiddled the unit of measurement. This is exactly what is happening with government-issued money around the world. This is not some conspiracy theory, go and check the Bank of England’s own website or that of the U.S. federal reserve and look for M2 money supply. You will see for the UK that the £ has been inflated by 6% on average every year for the last 20 years, and 16% in 2020 alone. The U.S has a higher annual average and last year exceeded 25%! Rather than the real inflation figure of M2 money supply, governments promote a very dubious measure of inflation and they call it CPI, it’s a cherry-picked basket of products and does not even include most peoples biggest ever purchase, their house. Surprisingly the UK’s average of 6% is actually quite good compared to most countries where it can be much higher. Though the UK is not good, it’s just one of the better ones out of a bad bunch. We have established that your income and savings are being devalued by 6% a year on average. This is partially offset by technological improvements in production that would have otherwise reduced the price of goods, also we might get rewarded by a 2% pay rise for hard work or a promotion. However, unless production cost-savings and pay rises combined don’t overcome the 6% inflation rate, which rarely they do, then we are losing savings and having pay cuts in real purchasing power terms. Some people invest in stocks, property etc. which helps to protect against this erosion of purchasing power but it can be tough to safely exceed 6% annual returns which is effectively just the break-even point. The outrageous part is, even if you did manage to beat the market and bag a 7% return you would get a 20% capital gains tax bill (for the UK, other countries similar) bringing your net return back below 6%. Inflation is the leading cause of wealth inequality, the rich half of society have the know-how and the resources to invest so that they can mitigate this effect to some extent but the poorer half who live month to month on their salary are left wide open to this and are being decimated over the long term. This is where Bitcoin comes in, Bitcoin is a scarce asset limited to 21,000,000 coins, each coin divisible into 100,000,000 parts called satoshis. New coins are added to the network every day but the rate of inflation always reduces, the current rate is ~2%, this halves every 4 years and the supply will never exceed the cap stated above. If Bitcoin achieves global adoption, as a store of value, real money, then the volatility will greatly reduce. It will enable billions of everyday people to just store their hard-earned value in money, rather than also having to go off and be professional investors alongside their current profession. In the meantime, we have the volatility, but this averages to the upside so you can benefit from this while it is undervalued and not yet mass adopted. History has proved that eventually the hardest money always wins across the world. Bitcoin is soon to be the worlds hardest money, it’s already way ahead of all government currency and silver. It will overtake gold by 2024. Back to altcoins, they may be great payment mechanisms but they are not great stores of value. Bitcoin has the network effect, security and decentralisation on its side and is the best protected from human corruption. Altcoins have a leader, a company etc. and are much more susceptible to human interference. Good intentions eventually turn to greed. As I said some of these coins can go from $1 to $1000 in a year making a $100 investment lifechanging but there are thousands of altcoins and picking the right one, not to mention timing the buy and sell correctly, is extremely difficult and needs a lot of knowledge, emotional fortitude and luck to get right. The vast majority, if not all altcoins over the long term lose value compared to Bitcoin most of its top 10 competitors come and go and yet Bitcoin stays top. Even Ethereum the number 2 coin has still not reached the high it made against Bitcoin in January 2018. I do personally hold some altcoins but 99% of them were bought pre-2020. I do still hold them, as historically they tend to outperform Bitcoin in the main year of the Bitcoin bull run. Combined they make a minority share of my overall portfolio, Bitcoin being the significant majority and I will be selling them all for Bitcoin before the end of 2021. Although I am expecting a big rise in altcoins this year there is no guarantee that history will repeat, so this is absolutely a risk and should not be taken lightly. It is best to avoid altcoins altogether but if you have to buy them keep the percentage allocation low ie. Bitcoin 90% and altcoins 10%. I am doing this with over 4 years of being obsessed with the industry and spending 10,000’s of hours consuming books, articles, podcasts and videos and there is still a good chance that my picks and timing will be wrong. An inexperienced person playing this game may as well play with fire at a petrol station, many have lost fortunes. Yes, the coins can go up 1000x but they can also lose 99.99% of their value and even go to $0. I can’t rule out that a small number of them may be successful long term but it will be for different reasons, Ethereum may become a smart contract platform but it will not replace Bitcoin as money. Bitcoin does everything it needs to do right now. A payments layer is just the cherry on the top and will come in time. The real use is the store of value and protection from inflation in a safe, secure and trustless way. Bitcoin does this perfectly and no altcoin can rival this function without major trade-offs.

Just for a published record, I would like to leave my expected Bitcoin price points. I would expect that before the end of 2021 we will see a price between $100,000 and $300,000. By the end of 2030, I would expect to see prices comfortably reach in excess of $1,000,000. These prices might seem crazy but again it comes back to obtaining the knowledge and understanding of why this is not just possible but likely. Bear in mind the total Bitcoin value by market cap is only $1.09 trillion. This might sound large but considering that other asset classes such as gold, stocks, bonds and property range from tens to hundreds of trillions Bitcoin is actually very small and has a lot of room to grow when it sucks the monetary premium out of these other assets. Monetary premium is the portion of these assets used as a store of value by investors, for example, London and New York apartments do not sell for $100,000,000+ just for their utility as shelter, investors are using them to store wealth. I will leave links to further learning resources below. Bitcoin is inevitable!

Podcasts
The Bullish case for bitcoin - https://www.defiance.news/podcast/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin

Robert Breedlove common misconceptions about Bitcoin - https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bf-001-bitcoin-common-misconceptions-w-robert-breedlove/

What Bitcoin Did - https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/

Preston Pysh - https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/

Stephan Livera - https://stephanlivera.com/

Courses
Micheal Saylor online Bitcoin Course - https://learn.saylor.org/course/PRDV151

Books
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous - https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+bitcoin+standard&adgrpid=52951050677&gclid=CjwKCAjwu5CDBhB9EiwA0w6sLZbsQqtHpsN5QLD0RrEsBmJxl9Iaatr36K3e_LVAnzYRdqYGYF-RHhoCTQoQAvD_BwE&hvadid=259091484382&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1006530&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=b&hvrand=15760406440440759167&hvtargid=kwd-380765199090&hydadcr=18487_1772445&tag=googhydr-21&ref=pd_sl_5pn0s61w22_b