As my friend nicely put it: only way we could have gotten rich from BTC is had we bought it when it was pennies and forgotten about it up until last year
There's just no way I see myself not getting out at $100k or say $200k. And I'm not risking my money on an investment that can 'only' do 2x or 4x. Bitcoin was cool as it could do 10x or 100x in the span of 1-2 years. But with the numbers where they're at and knowing myself, I'd cash out way before that.
In the end because bitcoin isn't being used by virtually anyone, and is only valuable because of the momentum/hype (i.e., the reason I'd buy it is only because other people buying it solely for the purpose of thinking even more others will buy it only for speculation and not use, and the price rises), it's just not an interesting investment for me long-term. Short-term it could be but I'd be as not surprised if it did -50% as if it did +50% in the next year. Not really interested in that kind of exposure, given that I don't think I'll ever hold enough to enjoy the extreme potential upside.
Wouldn't a better strategy be to e.g. wait until Bitcoin doubles (which you believe is likely to happen), then sell half (so that you get your money back, sans inflation)... and then for the following twenty years, sell 5% of the remaining Bitcoins each year?
The greatest risk is that maybe Bitcoin never doubles, and maybe you lose all the money you put it. But at the moment the price doubles and you sell half, so you get your money back... why throw away the chance of maybe getting insanely rich in the future?
Suppose you have 100k, invest 20k of it in bitcoin and it doubles. You now have 40k bitcoin and 120k in total.
You could say, sell half the bitcoin, you now still have 100k in other assets and 20k in bitcoin. Even if you lose the entire 20k, you'll never lose more than what you put in.
But what does it matter? Fact is, you still lose 20k if bitcoin goes to zero. The fact you already made 20k on it doesn't change that fact.
The source of your wealth should not indicate whether a loss is good or bad, or bearable or unbearable. At the end of the day, a loss is a loss. All your wealth goes into one big pot, you can't say 'this part is from savings, this part is from bitcoin'. It's just money, and losing it sucks.
Of course there is something to be said about reducing your exposure to bitcoin as you grow richer and need to take less risky bets. But that's only great after the fact that bitcoin keeps going up in price. If bitcoin goes down in price, it's of course a poor idea to sell slowly instead of all at once. Again, a loss of $X is a loss of $X.
At the end of the day, virtually everyone holds bitcoin not for the actual value of e.g. owning a small portion of Apple which sells something hundreds of millions of people use daily, profits, which flows back to you. Instead virtually everyone holds it simply because others are, and by doing so together, it keeps going up in price. You could apply the same to any other (scarce) good. Like a useless but rare metal. Or indeed, a useless copy-paste of the bitcoin software, to start a new crypto. Bitcoin's price isn't because it's valuable, it's because of a common idea to buy it because it'll make us rich. And that idea cannot hold true on anything but faith. Humans are pretty crazy and so I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin goes to $200k within 2-3 years. But it's still an insane investment proposition to me. (coming from a person who held 100% of his net worth in bitcoin for 3 years or so, btw).
If the GP had sold 99% of his 3650 coins and kept 1% till now, that would still be $1.8m.
Alternatively you can set yourself a price threshold. For example, sell half your holdings every time the price doubles. Essentially this acts as a log function on your gains in exchange for lowering risk.
There's a ton of room for fine tuning a set of rules to manage risk, as long as you are willing to stick to them.
That's basically what the "hodl" meme is: just decide to not sell until you need the money or until the money could significantly change your life. Of course, that's not exactly a new "investment" idea: there's always been a big difference between day-trading and just buying stocks (and index funds, etc.) with the intention to hold essentially indefinitely.