Holding Through 2022

Elena had been in Bitcoin since 2019. She’d watched it go from $7,000 to $69,000, and she hadn’t sold. Then 2022 arrived.

By May, Luna had collapsed. By June, multiple lending platforms had frozen withdrawals. By November, FTX was gone. Bitcoin had fallen from $69,000 to $16,000 — a 77% decline in twelve months.

Every week brought new bad news. Not just price movement — actual fraud, actual collapse, actual people losing money. The narrative wasn’t just “price is down.” It was “the whole thing was a scam.”

Elena had a thesis. She’d spent years building it. She could articulate, clearly, why Bitcoin’s properties were intact regardless of what happened to exchanges and lending platforms. She knew the difference between the network and the centralised businesses built around it.

But knowing something intellectually and feeling it emotionally are different things.

She stopped checking the price. She removed the apps from her phone’s home screen. She reread her thesis document — a few paragraphs she’d written down years earlier explaining why she held Bitcoin and what would change her mind. Nothing in it had changed.

She held.

By the end of 2023, Bitcoin had recovered significantly. By 2024, it was above her best days of 2021. The thesis was still intact. The position she’d held through the worst year in Bitcoin’s recent history was, by any reasonable measure, vindicated.

She doesn’t know if it will stay that way. Nobody does. But the decision to hold was made from the thesis, not from the price. And that, she says, is the only way she could have done it.

Tomorrow: Block 3 recap — the psychology of holding.

— The Daily Bit