There are many different reasons to love the blockchain world. To me personally, the number 1 reason is that it allows me to build my wealth and create something for me in my future in a way that's totally stress-less. I'm out there everyday, increasing my stake, stacking Satoshis. I'm doing so by writing articles like the one you are reading right now, through interaction on crypto social media sites like noise.cash or Torum. I play games, I hunt referrals, and I do so much more. None of this feels like work to me. Actually, it's part of my leisure time to do these things. All the while, I'm creating hundreds of dollars worth of value for me every month. In short, it's a match made in heaven. Spending quality time and being rewarded for it, isn't that just perfect?
Well it is, obviously, but there are little things disturbing the utopia - stress where there should be no stress, the fear of missing out on stuff. In this article I want to address these issues, analyze where they are coming from and give some personal advise on how to best deal with the issue.
We all love bull markets. After all, this is what we've all been waiting for. It's the time when all our hard work will finally pay off. It's when the 10$ worth of that random token we accumulated suddenly is worth 500$. But with all that euphoria also comes an odd sense of stress to many of us. I've been feeling it myself, especially since I've started to bring friends to blockchain as well. It started as an odd feeling of urgency and with every passing day in the bull market I started to feel more stressed. What's the reason for all this?
There are certainly several reasons that play their part, probably in varying severity for different people. For one, we are used to bear markets, it's the state the crypto world has mostly been in these last years. During a bear market, we just accumulate. It's not so much about the value of the coins we gather and more about the amount of coins we have. What do I care if Bitcoin is 7,000$ or 8,000$ right now, I know it will be 250,000$ eventually. But in a bull market, this suddenly changes. Values are going crazy, over night a token will gain 20% or more in value, just to drop back 15% the next day. It feels like you are constantly missing out on something.
This is where the term FOMO is coming from - it's the fear of missing out and it's a feeling basically everybody in the crypto market will have to deal with. It's always there, be it bull or bear market, but during a bull run it becomes amplified by a lot. "Bitcoin just crossed 50k, it will never go below that value again, I have to buy NOW!". For some reason, people are much more likely to buy right at the all time high, even if they had months or even years to prepare for that exact situation but never did buy the token before. We start to trade emotionally, spend money we probably shouldn't and try to get in before "it's too late". I know all this but nevertheless, I still have issues dealing with it. So... what can you do?
The stupidly easy answer is: Stay calm! Obviously, that's a lot easier said than done, but it really is all there is. But how can you stay calm with all the crazy action happening around us? I'm sure everybody will have different ways to calm himself, but to me, it helps to just look at some of the facts. Yes, there's a lot of price action right now, yes I probably should have bought more BTC when I had the chance, but so what? Crypto is an emerging market, one could even say it's THE emerging market of our time. Long term, crypto is only going to grow and we are still really early in all this. Most of the world hasn't even heard of blockchain technology and each and everyone of us in this thing right now is going to profit from it a lot. This is not the first bull market and it certainly won't be the last. You don't have to accomplish everything this time around!
That's not to say you shouldn't try to make the best of it, but the key is to do so in a healthy fashion. If you are having issues to think about anything non crypto, if you dream about Bitcoin charts at night, then things are probably getting obsessive and you should really take a step back. The one fact that's most important to remember in my opinion is that time in the market is always going to beat timing in the market. We always feel like we need to time our buy and sells perfectly so we make the most out of crypto. The truth is, though, if you bought BTC in 2020 and just held on to it, you are at a 500% gain right now! 500% - that's an unbelievable amount and quite frankly, most of us will have a hard time to get even close to these numbers by trading or timing the market. In fact, my portfolio's value increased way more through simply holding tokens than it did through actual trading.
Again, obviously, there are people out there that earn absurd amounts of money through trading and if you are one of them, more power to you! But trading is hard, cold work. It's damn stressful, it's risky, and chances are there are always smarter guys out there only waiting to scalp you. So really, instead of worrying about all the market movements, we should just lay back and enjoy the show. If you have to, take your profits when it feels right to you, but don't look back afterwards, just do it and be happy with what you got. But if you don't have to, there's no real reason to do anything. You don't have to change your habits. Just keep accumulating, knowing that over time, value of everything you collect is only going up.
Ever since I've understood that, things have gotten a lot more relaxed for me again. I'm still out there, accumulating what ever I can get my hands on. I don't need to sell anything. I don't have to try and time the market. I'm just doing my thing, everyday, and I will reap the rewards for what I'm doing. If not now, another bull run will come, and it will be even larger than what we are seeing today. The wonderful truth is, crypto has us all covered. We just need to be patient, hold on to what we have and build on top of that whenever we can. Without all that pressure, crypto has once again become what it should be for me - the most profitable and entertaining hobby you could hope to have...
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!