Yes and yes.

I made the exact opposite mistake in 2017. Can you believe I sold bitcoin to by my wife a Honda minivan?

That minivan cost me about $407,076.33. Roughly. More or less. Not that I’m counting or anything.

If I would have borrowed the dollars and bought the minivan, I would have been up $350,000 or more.

If I would have borrowed money, fixed the old minivan and bought bitcoin with the rest, I’d be up $700,000 or so.

I have a decent income, so all of this would have been possible for me. But I was too proud to borrow dollars and too risk averse / too ignorant to buy bitcoin on leverage. Leverage requires restraint and properly sizing the amount of leverage one uses it’s not obvious. I still can’t borrow to buy bitcoin, even though intellectually I know I could/should do so modestly.

But what I have learned: once you start selling bitcoin, your stack will never be that size again. Or probably not. I’ve bought back the amount I’ve spent on the minivan, but at a dear price.

Not my first mistake selling bitcoin, but the earlier ones are still too painful to talk about.

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Discussion

Its can be tough trying to balance wants vs needs. I havent sold any btc, and i hope i never have to. I think in the future, as btc becomes more commonplace, it will be the norm for "banks" of some kind to loan money with btc as collateral. Not a perfect situation, but at least it could get a person out of a pinch without selling the btc. We all make mistakes and learn from them.

This is true.

I’d rather die with my stack at its current size than be rich in a world without bitcoin.