My mother had a lot of handbags and shoes, and other than one time as a three or four year old where I dressed in a pair of her heels and put on some bright red lipstick, I was more into the handbags. While I do have pretty good taste in accessories and women's clothing, the thing that interested me the most about the bags, was what was in them.
Change
One of my brother's and I would rummage through them all, looking for coins and back then, there were copper 1 and 2 cent pieces that were common to find, a few fives and if we were really lucky, some 10s, 20, and the holy grail of a 50 cent piece. We didn't do this to stick into our piggybank - in fact, neither of us had a piggy bank. Instead, what we wanted was candy.
We would collect what we could scrounge together and then walk the two kilometers to the local petrol station and buy "mixed lolly bags" - handmade collections of random candy that were packaged in white paper bags. Back then, a dollar would buy quite a solid pack and was plenty for the three of us - my little sister included.
Good times.
While this didn't do much for any of our health, nor did it do anything for teaching us how to save money, what it did do is reinforce the lesson that in order to have what we wanted, we needed money to get it and some way to get that money. Since we couldn't earn, we had to find another way. In a household that didn't have candy available often, going through this process whenever my parents were out and we were looking after ourselves, felt like working for something we wanted. Some might call this work "theft" - but it wasn't like our mother was going to be paying anything with the shrapnel at the bottom of her bags.
Still to this day, I get a sense of accomplishment through working for an income, but this doesn't mean that I don't embrace other ways. While I don't want to do nothing for money, I do understand the importance of generating alternate sources of income that are largely more passive, so that while I am working, my money is also working for me in tandem, making what I earn more valuable over time.
I think that this is something everyone should consider in regards to their investments, as we have no natural intuition for the power of compounding, especially when it is happening over longer periods of time. As we are increasingly living in an instant gratification environment, we have less availability of opportunity to learn the rules and retrain our intuition, especially since our attention gravitates to the here and now and instant desire satisfaction points.
This is the daily chart on BTC.
All year, it has been travelling sideways in this range, despite the ups and the downs today, we are pretty much in the middle of that range still. Is the bull over and the bear beginning? I don't think so, as the breakout bull hasn't even arrived yet, making this the lamest bull cycle if that is the case. If it is the case however, I won't be too upset overall, as this is not what I have been collecting for - this is not the bag of candy.
So far, this year has been largely like when I was a kid, rummaging through my mother's handbags collecting coins. I have been doing it in several ways with investments into CUB and Splinterlands for example and have been consistently increasing my holdings, even though prices on both are going down. The reason is that since I am a crypto believer, I take the approach that even if I overpay for something today, it is going to be affected by the compounding of time and when the moment does come to walk to the corner store, what I have collected will be worth more than what I paid, especially if I am able to earn more on it while collecting. Rather than being able to get a dollar bag of candy, perhaps I will have been able to collect enough to get $1.50 worth instead.
A lot of people laugh at "bagholders" in the past, but bag-holding is definitely not what it used to be, now that there are more ways to increase the token stack during the downward and slow times, without buying or selling. This means that at least with the right tokens, once the bull cycles do come around, the bagholders will start to see their value climb at a faster rate than what their starting holdings might have indicated.
For example, while people scoff at the 10% yield on Hive curation, it really depends on when you bought it and how long you have kept it activated. For example, 10,000 HIVE POWER at the start of the year was around $1100 dollars worth - now it is around $14,000 worth. But in that time, the HP could have earned about another 1000 HIVE in rewards, with a value of $1400, worth 300 more than the initial investment. A few weeks ago at the ATH of HIVE ,it would have been an extra $3,400 worth, 3x gain on the starting capital, even though it is only 10% of the initial tokens.
Candy Income
Of course, that is more like my candy money for the next half decade, but the concept is the same. Quite often, people are so unwilling to hold through the bear, that they forget that there will be bulls and once they do arrive, they are trapped largely coinless, having spent their gains at the highs on whatever they did, but most never finding a low "low-enough" to enter into the market again. I think that now with more people moving into yield farming, this will be less of an issue in the next bullrun, but it will also mean that the lows aren't as low, as more people are staking rather than selling to secure their gains. This ultimately helps the yield farmers earn more too, while the no-coiners are waiting to buy in.
With the latest dips, I have used the BUSD I have to combine with CUB into the pool there, as I figure that adding occasionally into something that has a 110% APY isn't such a silly idea, especially with the coming (one day) PolyCub contracts and airdrops.
For me, a large "payday" would be brilliant, but ultimately, I don't want to then have to worry about what I am going to do with what I have so it doesn't all just get whittled away. I am planning on taking a wider hybrid approach to make sure that while I might miss immediate gains, I will have a steady stream of trickle income and multipliers working for me, so three or four years from now, the candy money collected will be significantly boosted by the compounding interest of time in the crypto markets. Of course, this isn't all exactly "set and forget", yet it is still semi-passive and is manageable while I am earning doing other things, like my IRL jobs.
We all have our own paths though and this might all collapse into nothing and I will be one of those lamenting investors complaining about what could've been, but at least - there are some coins in the bottom of the bags still, so the candy run is still on.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]