FOMO is the “fear of missing out”, and there are a lot of people who fear they are missing out on bitcoin. Bitcoin FOMO describes people who don’t have bitcoin are worried that the bitcoin revolution is happening without them. Bitcoin FOMO describes people with bitcoin are worried that they don’t have enough bitcoin.
FOMO is often used humorously, but when you get FOMO with finances, you can end up in a bad spot. This article is meant to have somewhat of a humorous tone to it, but there are some serious recommendations within, so you don’t get rekt along the way. Here are some signs you have FOMO, the pros and cons of each, and my recommendations.
Bitcoin FOMO is common. Once you realize that Bitcoin is the next phase of money for a globalized, digitized society, you’ll want to stack as much as you can, as fast as you can. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Just don’t put yourself in a bad place and go overboard.
4 Signs You Have Bitcoin FOMO
1. You’re Looking At The Price Every 10 Minutes
The biggest sign you have bitcoin FOMO is that you’re checking the price every ten minutes. Bitcoin is a famously volatile asset, so there can be huge price movements in a matter of moments.
What’s the root cause of frequent price checking? Maybe you went “all in” and are waiting to get rich. Maybe you have some cash on the sidelines and are waiting for a dip. Whatever the reason, you keep flipping your phone over or switching browser tabs to see check out bitcoin’s price action.
Unfortunately, this is me. It’s a really bad habit, so I can speak from experience when I offer this advice that I don’t often take myself.
- The price doesn’t really change that much, or that often. While you may see a 5% move up or down during the day, it typically ranges for long periods of time. Though I check my phone every 10 minutes to see the price, realistically I could reduce that to once a week and I still wouldn’t be surprised very often. Drastic moves to the upside or downside are not the norm.
- You’re not more likely to catch a once-in-a-generation dip even if you watch the charts every second. If you’re waiting for a dip, set up an alert on your phone for price movements to get notified. It’s rare for the price to drop drastically, then recover instantly. It does happen, but it’s rare. Catching a falling knife is not a healthy accumulation strategy. Get comfortable knowing you’ll never catch the exact bottom.
- That time spent price checking could instead be used for something productive. Read a book about bitcoin. Listen to some bitcoin podcasts. Read some bitcoin articles. Instead of doing something useless like checking the price, build your bitcoin knowledge and strengthen your resolve. Next time we experience an 80% price drop, you’ll be ready to weather the storm with confidence. Next time there’s a 300% pump, you won’t smash buy into a frothy market.
Checking the bitcoin price frequently is a non-productive activity that quickly turns into a mindless habit. I know it’s exciting to put money into bitcoin, and it’s even more exciting when the price goes up, but knowing your net worth in USD down the precise dollar amount every minute is not going to make you a happier person.
2. You’re Emptying Stock Accounts For Bitcoin
Once you have your orange pill moment, you really start to revisit your investment decisions and compare them to bitcoin.
Are they liquid?
Can I trade them freely peer to peer?
Can I buy things with them?
Do they have 100% compound annual growth?
Do they have counterparty risk?
Did I actually understand the investment when I bought it?
When you do your research into bitcoin, it becomes clear that bitcoin offers not just superior returns to the stock market over the long term, but also offers a number of other advantages. Stocks trade just a few hours per day, only 5 days a week minus holidays, and they are held by a custodian. Index funds can be a great investment for the average person who doesn’t want to do any research into investing and is happy with average returns, but if you want control of your money, index funds may not be the best investment.
With bitcoin, I have full control over my money 24/7 and can take it with me anywhere in the world.
I’ve sold most of my stocks for bitcoin at this point, so I fit this category of Bitcoin FOMO as well. As I learned more about bitcoin, I realized I didn’t know anything about the stocks I was invested in. I had some shares of companies I thought were interesting and would grow, but I had no idea what their balance sheet looked like. I never read quarterly reports. I didn’t know anything about the business except on the consumer level, so what was the point of me investing – winning a guessing game?
On the other hand, I actually knew a lot about Bitcoin and had very high conviction about its future as a digital asset and global money. It made sense for me to buy bitcoin because I believed in it and understood it.
3. You’re Selling Stuff For Bitcoin
Another thing that becomes obvious as you go down the bitcoin rabbit hole is that money is value, and the stuff you have, if it’s doing anything for you, is draining value from your life. Your stuff just sits there, wasting space, and it starts calling out to you to turn it into something more productive.
I don’t actually own a lot of extra things I don’t need, so I can’t say that I’ve sold too much for bitcoin myself, but this is a common meme you hear among bitcoins. Lots of people have sold extra cars, rentals, land, and other assets for bitcoin.
These days, it’s super easy to sell the stuff you don’t want on eBay, Etsy, and phone apps with local listings. Instead of having a useless item sitting in your garage or on a shelf, you can transform it into bitcoin.
Suddenly, you see bitcoin everywhere. Do I really need that extra chair? How long has it been since I played that video game console? There’s bitcoin stored in those things!
Even just a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff sold could be worth a lot more in the future. While junk almost always depreciates in value over time, bitcoin tends to do the opposite. Imagine selling an old couch for 丰100,000 and seeing it 10x its purchasing power over the next few years.
4. You Regret Not Buying More, And Not Buying Earlier
Not buying enough bitcoin is the #1 regret in a bull market. Of course, buying too much bitcoin is the #2 regret once a bear market hits, but long term, most people regret not buying more. You’ve got to realize that nobody can predict the market, so you can’t beat yourself up for making the “wrong” moves.
Bitcoin has been in a bull market since 2009
Bitcoin Axiom
Everyone regrets not buying more bitcoin. Even long-time bitcoiners say that they didn’t stack enough. You can’t spend too much time regretting when or how much you bought. The key is to not make the same mistake next time around.
If you regret not buying more in the past, then buy that amount now, and sit on your bitcoin for ten years.
My philosophy is always: imagine buying the top of the 2011 rally. You’d have to wait more than ten years and 3 bear markets to see bitcoin transform from dollars per coin to tens of thousands of dollars per coin, but at the end of it, would you care if you bought at $1.00 or $1.50? Probably not! If you’re going to survive the next decade of bull & bear markets you have to let go of the idea of timing the bottom. You’ll never have enough bitcoin, so chill out, buy what you can, and stick around for the long haul.
The best time to buy bitcoin was ten years ago. The second best time is today.
Bitcoin Axiom
Nocoiner FOMO
Typically, bitcoin FOMO comes from someone who has some bitcoin and is worried that they don’t have enough. Bitcoin is the best money in the world, and the funny thing about money is that demand for money never goes down. Nobody ever says, “I have enough bitcoin.”
Contrast that with “nocoiner FOMO”, i.e. someone who suddenly realizes that maybe they are missing out on this bitcoin thing. Then the neurons start firing.
What are bitcoin and crypto anyway?
Is it a big Ponzi or pyramid scheme?
Should I buy a little or a lot?
How do I even buy bitcoin?
How do I store it and can someone hack it?
There have been many skeptical nocoiners turned bitcoiners over the years. Nothing like bitcoin has ever existed, so it’s hard to fit it in a frame of reference. Could it really be that bitcoin is revolutionary technology, or has the world collectively lost their minds?
My advice here is to just buy a little to get some skin in the game then learn about it. Don’t buy enough where you’ll lose sleep over it, but buy enough so that you’re interested in figuring out proper custody and why everyone is so excited about bitcoin. You might be surprised to learn that many of your questions and hesitations have already been discussed and answered many times over the past decade.
Is Bitcoin FOMO Good Or Bad?
GOOD: Lump Sum Investing Beats DCA
The good news about bitcoin FOMO is that if you are accumulating as much bitcoin as you can as soon as possible, you’re probably going to do pretty well. Time in the market beats timing the market rings true with bitcoin, as lump sum investing typically outperforms dollar cost averaging.
You may have to stomach a deep dip of 20% or larger, but even a 50% drawdown isn’t very memorable when it’s followed by a 500% bull run.
BAD: It’s Easy To Forget The Real World Consequences
The bad news is that if you listen to some of the nutty people on Bitcoin Twitter, you may exchange every last penny of your fiat money for bitcoin to #getonzero, only to realize you actually need fiat money sometimes. This happened to me twice this year. I got carried away buying too much bitcoin, then had to sell during a market downturn in order to pay for some unexpected bills.
Buy bitcoin and the whole world buys with you. Sell, and you sell alone.
In both cases, it was a small amount I had to sell, and it wasn’t a catastrophic loss, but it was a good experience to see exactly how planning for best case scenario isn’t an ideal money management strategy.
GOOD: It Gets You Involved And Willing To Learn
Now that you sold all your stuff for bitcoin, what the hell is it anyway? Well, hopefully, you’ve done more research than that, but having skin in the game really is a great motivator for learning. It’s one thing to understand bitcoin as an idea, but to really “get it”, you need to use it. Understanding bitcoin is a lifelong journey. The bitcoin ecosystem is so large now, that there’s no single person who understands every single aspect.
Why did you get interested in bitcoin in the first place – Geopolitics? Finance? Localism? Sovereignty?
Then pick your method of learning. There are technical articles and news articles. There are YouTube videos and podcasts. There are Telegram groups and IRL meetups.
You can build on bitcoin. You can mine bitcoin at home. Or you can just hold it in cold storage as part of an investment strategy.
As the price of bitcoin goes up and starts to make up a greater portion of your net worth, your interest will likely grow as well.
BAD: It Can Give You Negative Feelings
Bitcoin can be hard to learn. It’s a multi-disciplinary topic covering finance, politics, technology, security, and more. You can’t become an expert in everything, and there is no universally accepted “expert opinion” about what bitcoin is or where it’s going to be in 10 years.
For me, sometimes I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface of understanding. Everyone seems like they know more than me, and I always feel like I don’t have enough bitcoin.
Plus, when you learn about bitcoin, you start to see some serious issues with our current financial system. Governments are issuing too much debt. Money printing is leading to wealth inequality and social unrest. High inflation. War with Russia. Financial censorship. Riots in the streets. The system is cracking and the future is uncertain.
Changing the global monetary infrastructure from fiat debt to hard money world comes with consequences. What will be the cost of hyperbitcoinization? Are we at peak fiat right now, or are things going to get worse?
Like bitcoin’s price volatility, being in the bitcoin world can make your emotions just as volatile.
GOOD: You Get To Talk About Bitcoin
To say it plainly, bitcoin is super interesting, and through bitcoin, you end up learning a lot about the world. By studying bitcoin, you learn about economics, geopolitics, technology, and social relationships. Bitcoin is full of great memes, great culture, and everyone is working together towards a bright orange future.
In a time when there’s so much divisiveness about everything going on, it’s nice to have something in common with a group of smart, enthusiastic, passionate, and positive people.
BAD: You Have To Talk About Bitcoin
Because bitcoin can be related to just about any topic you can think of, it can be hard to have a conversation without bringing up bitcoin. To a nocoiner, it’s a pretty annoying habit. OMG you’re just obsessed with bitcoin.
For me, I have to actively suppress the urge to bring up bitcoin in a conversation with normies because I know it’s annoying. I can see their eyes glaze over as soon as I bring up news from the bitcoin world. Just keep in mind that if you really get bitcoin FOMO, your friends may not share the same passion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is The Bitcoin FOMO Calculator?
Bitcoin FOMO Calculator is a fun little website where you can see how much your bitcoin would be worth if you had bought a certain amount at a certain date. Looking at insane price increases over the past decade is a great way to induce FOMO in yourself when you starting thinking about what the price of bitcoin might be after another decade of growth.
What Is Bitcoin FUD?
Bitcoin FUD is so-called arguments against bitcoin which have often been discussed and debunked for many years, yet seem to resurface from time to time with new enthusiasm. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, but shortened to FUD is a way of dismissing the specific criticism as unfounded, boring, and not worth giving a serious response.
What Is BTFD?
BTFD is shorthand for Buy The Fucking Dip, which is a call to action from other bitcoin investors. When the price dumps temporarily, it can be a signal to enthusiastic bitcoin buyers that a buying opportunity has arrived. However, be careful making investment decisions based on memes! Sometimes there’s a bigger dip behind that dip.
How Do I Get Over Bitcoin FOMO?
The best way to get over bitcoin FOMO is to buy a little, and set a schedule to dollar cost average (DCA) into bitcoin over time. With a little skin in the game, you can relax if the price pumps, knowing that at the very least, you didn’t have nothing. However, for beginner investors, including myself, when the price pumps, the FOMO gets real. My best advice is to simply follow in the footsteps of smarter and more clear-headed bitcoiners than yourself, and never invest more than you’ll need in the next few years. It’s real easy to get stuck in a bad spot if you start investing money that you would be very upset to see decline in value, because the price can move quickly in any direction.
Is The Bitcoin Market Dominance Metric Even Worth Considering?
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