Bitcoin just hit $60,000 this week, and if you’ve been in this space for any amount of time, you already know what the last two years sounded like. Every group chat, every comment section, every DM from that one friend who’s “interested but waiting.”
“I’ll buy when it dips.” “If it ever goes back to $60K, I’m loading up.” “I’m not buying the top, I’ll wait for a pullback.”
I heard it hundreds of times, and maybe you said it yourself. Honestly, it made sense . Buying at $100K or $120K feels uncomfortable, and waiting for a better price sounds like the smart, responsible thing to do. Nobody wants to feel like they overpaid.
Well, now it pulled back. $60K showed up right there on the screen, the exact number people said they were waiting for. And most of them didn’t buy. Some of them actually panicked and sold what they already had. The same people who were begging for this price six months ago watched it arrive and couldn’t pull the trigger.
I’m not saying this to call anyone out, because this isn’t a willpower problem and it’s not about being lazy or not caring enough. It’s something deeper than that. It’s how our brains are wired when it comes to money and risk.
So let’s break it down, because I think this is one of the most important things to understand if you want to actually build wealth in Bitcoin.
The Psychology of “Waiting”
Here’s the thing about price that nobody really talks about. The way a number feels completely depends on the direction you’re looking at it from. When Bitcoin was sitting at $120K and someone told you “what if it dropped to $60K?”, that sounded like an absolute gift. You’d picture yourself loading up, finally getting the entry you always wanted, feeling like you timed it perfectly.
But when Bitcoin is actually falling to $60K, that same price feels completely different. It doesn’t feel like a sale anymore. It feels like something is wrong. And that’s because the price didn’t just show up at $60K out of nowhere, it got there because the market was bleeding, the news was terrible, and everyone around you was panicking. That’s the part people forget when they fantasize about buying the dip from the comfort of an all-time high.
It’s kind of like house shopping. Everyone says “I’d love to buy a house in a recession when prices are low,” but when the recession actually hits and you’re worried about your job and the economy looks like it’s falling apart, suddenly that cheap house doesn’t feel like a bargain anymore. It feels like a risk you can’t afford to take. The opportunity and the fear always show up at the same time, and that’s by design.
Warren Buffett has talked about this for decades. His whole “be greedy when others are fearful” line is probably the most quoted piece of investing advice in history, and yet almost nobody actually does it. Because it sounds great in theory, but in practice, “when others are fearful” means you’re fearful too.
You’re not watching the fear from some calm, detached place, you’re sitting right in the middle of it, feeling everything everyone else is feeling. Buffett himself has said that investing is not a game of IQ, it’s a game of temperament, and I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing play out right now with Bitcoin.
And here’s the thing, history has proven this pattern right over and over again. Think about Amazon in 2001. After the dot-com crash, Amazon’s stock dropped from around $107 to under $6. Six dollars. The headlines were brutal, analysts were writing the company off, and buying that stock felt like throwing money into a fire. But if you had the stomach to buy just $1,000 worth of Amazon at $6, that investment would be worth well over $300,000 today. The people who bought weren’t geniuses who could see the future, they just had the temperament to act when everything around them was screaming not to. That’s the same exact dynamic playing out with Bitcoin right now at $60K.
The reason it’s cheap is because of the fear. That’s literally how it works. Assets don’t go on sale when everyone is feeling great about them. They go on sale when the mood is awful, when the headlines are scary, and when your gut is telling you to stay away. Your brain genuinely cannot tell the difference between “this is on sale” and “this is broken,” because in the moment, both of those things look exactly the same. Your survival instincts don’t care about your portfolio strategy, they just see danger and tell you to back off.
So when people say “I’ll buy when it dips,” what they’re really saying without realizing it is “I’ll buy when the conditions are perfect.” But as Howard Marks likes to put it, the best buying opportunities come when things look worst, and if you’re waiting for things to feel comfortable before you act, you’ll always be too late. The conditions at the bottom are never perfect. They’re the opposite of perfect, and that’s the whole point.
The Excuses
So the dip finally comes, the price is right there where you said you wanted it, and what happens? The goalposts move. It’s almost like clockwork, the brain immediately starts looking for a new reason not to act, and it’s incredibly good at finding one.
“Let me just wait and see if it goes a little lower.” “This time feels different, I don’t think the same rules apply.” “I’ll wait for some confirmation that we’ve actually bottomed.” “Maybe I should hold out for $50K, just to be safe.” You’ve probably heard yourself say at least one of these, and they all sound perfectly reasonable in the moment, which is exactly what makes them so dangerous.
There’s a great story about this from the 2008 financial crisis. After John Paulson made $15 billion betting against the housing market, he turned around and started aggressively buying bank stocks in 2009 when the entire financial system looked like it was on the verge of collapse.
One of his biggest bets was Citigroup, which he started buying when the stock was trading around $3 to $4 a share. At the time, people genuinely thought Citi might go to zero because the headlines were all about bailouts, bank failures, and the end of Wall Street as we knew it. But Paulson kept buying, and over the next 18 months that single Citigroup position made him over $1 billion as the stock recovered. He also piled into Bank of America to the tune of about $3 billion worth of shares, building one of the largest positions in the company.
The key thing is that even Paulson didn’t catch the exact bottom, some of his positions kept falling before they recovered, and he was criticized for it in the moment. But he didn’t care about nailing the perfect entry, he cared about being positioned while everyone else was still frozen on the sidelines arguing about whether it could go lower. And that made all the difference.
The truth is, every single one of those excuses is just fear wearing a rational disguise. “Let me wait for confirmation” sounds like a strategy, but what it really means is “I want to feel safe before I act,” and by the time you feel safe, the price has already recovered and you’re back to saying “I’ll buy the next dip.”
It’s a loop, and it can go on for years if you let it. I’ve watched people ride this exact cycle through multiple Bitcoin bull and bear markets, always almost buying, always finding one more reason to wait, always kicking themselves six months later.
And here’s the uncomfortable part - there is no perfect entry. It doesn’t exist. Even the most legendary investors in history didn’t nail the exact bottom. Peter Lynch, who ran the most successful mutual fund of all time, famously said that far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections than in the corrections themselves. The people who build real wealth aren’t the ones who time it perfectly, they’re the ones who actually show up and make a decision while everyone else is still debating with themselves.
What Separates Buyers from Waiters
So if the people who bought this week aren’t smarter than everyone else, and they’re not some special breed of fearless investor, what actually makes them different? It’s simpler than you’d think. Its because hey made the decision before the emotions showed up.
That’s really all it comes down to. The people who bought Bitcoin at $60K this week aren’t sitting there with nerves of steel, calmly sipping coffee while the market burns. Most of them were probably just as nervous as everyone else. The difference is that at some point in the past, when things were calm, when they could think clearly, they sat down and made a plan. Maybe it was a DCA strategy where a set amount goes in every week no matter what. Maybe it was a number written on a sticky note that said “if Bitcoin hits $60K, I buy.” Maybe it was just an automatic recurring purchase that they set up months ago and honestly forgot about. Whatever it was, the decision was already made before the chaos hit, and that’s what saved them from freezing.
There’s a reason why the military doesn’t wait until the middle of a firefight to come up with a plan. They train for it over and over in calm, controlled environments so that when the real thing happens, they don’t have to think, they just execute.
Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making, spent his entire career showing that humans make terrible choices under stress and emotion. That’s not a character flaw, it’s just how the brain works. When your amygdala is firing because your portfolio is down 40%, the rational part of your brain essentially goes offline, and you’re left making decisions with the same part of your brain that would tell you to run from a bear in the woods. That’s why the plan has to come first.
I think about it like writing a will — nobody wants to do it, it’s uncomfortable, and it forces you to confront scenarios you’d rather not think about. But the whole point is that you make those decisions when you’re calm and clearheaded, because when the moment actually arrives, you’re in no state to be making rational choices.
Investing is the same way. The best time to decide what you’ll do in a crash is long before the crash happens, because once you’re in it, your brain is working against you whether you realize it or not.
So if you didn’t buy this week, the question isn’t “what’s wrong with me?” it’s “did I have a plan?” And if the answer is no, the good news is that it’s not too late. Bitcoin is still right here, the opportunity hasn’t disappeared overnight, and you can start building that plan right now. Set up a DCA, pick a number, automate something — whatever it is, just get it in place while you’re thinking clearly, because the window where prices are low and fear is high doesn’t stay open forever. The people who act in the next few weeks while everyone else is still hesitating are going to be the ones who look back on this moment and feel great about it.
The Real Cost of Waiting
There’s a particular kind of pain that doesn’t get talked about enough in investing, and it’s not the pain of losing money, it’s the pain of almost acting. Every single Bitcoin cycle has a group of people who got so close to buying, who did all the research, who told their friends they were going to do it, and then just... didn’t. And these aren’t hypothetical people, they’re everywhere.
In 2015, Bitcoin was sitting around $200 and the narrative was that it was dead. The exchanges were sketchy, Mt. Gox had just collapsed, and mainstream opinion was that the whole thing was a failed experiment. Some people almost bought.
By 2017, that $200 Bitcoin was worth $20,000. In 2019, after the crash from that $20K high, Bitcoin was hanging around $3,500 to $4,000 and the sentiment was just as bleak. “Crypto winter” was the phrase everyone used, and it felt like it could last forever. Some people almost bought again.
By 2021, that $3,500 Bitcoin hit $69,000. And then in 2022, when everything crashed back down to $16K and FTX had just blown up and the entire industry looked like it was imploding, some of those same people almost bought for the third time. That $16K Bitcoin eventually hit $120K.
I’ve talked to people who have been “almost buying” Bitcoin since 2017, and the thing that strikes me isn’t that they’re bad with money or that they don’t understand the opportunity, it’s that they’ve been carrying this weight around with them for years. They can tell you exactly what they would have had if they’d just pulled the trigger. They’ve done the math more times than they’d like to admit. And that mental burden, that constant loop of “what if I had just done it,” is honestly heavier than any drawdown you’d experience from actually buying.
Because here’s the thing people don’t realize, if you buy Bitcoin and it drops another 20%, that’s a temporary financial setback that you’ll likely recover from. It stings, but it’s a number on a screen and it has a chance of going back up. But if you watch from the sidelines for years while the thing you knew you should’ve bought keeps going up without you, that’s not a financial loss, that’s a regret that compounds over time. And unlike a drawdown, regret doesn’t recover. It just sits there, getting heavier every cycle, and the math of what you could’ve had keeps getting more painful with every new all-time high.
The cost of waiting was never just about missed gains. It’s about what it does to you mentally to keep watching an opportunity pass you by, over and over again, knowing that the only thing standing between you and a completely different financial situation was a decision you couldn’t bring yourself to make.
The Fundamentals That Actually Matter
I think one of the reasons people get so caught up in the “should I buy now or wait” debate is because they’re looking at Bitcoin as a trade instead of looking at the bigger picture. They’re obsessing over entry points and chart patterns when the real question they should be asking themselves is much more basic. Do I have a financial foundation that actually makes sense?
Because the truth is, none of this matters if the fundamentals aren’t in place first. And when I say fundamentals, I’m not talking about Bitcoin’s hash rate or the halving cycle or any of that. I’m talking about your personal financial fundamentals, the boring stuff that nobody wants to talk about but that makes everything else possible.
The first one is simple, and it’s the one most people skip: spend less than you earn. I know that sounds like something your grandparents would say, but it’s the foundation that everything else is built on.
If more money is going out than coming in every month, it doesn’t matter whether Bitcoin is at $60K or $6K — you’re not in a position to take advantage of either. Getting your expenses below your income isn’t sexy, and nobody is making viral tweets about budgeting, but it’s the single most important financial decision you can make because it creates the raw material for everything that comes next.
The second one follows naturally from the first: save consistently, every single month, no matter what. Not when you feel like it, not when you get a bonus, not when the market looks good, every month. Even if it’s a small amount, the habit of putting something aside on a regular basis is what separates people who build wealth from people who just talk about it. And the consistency matters more than the amount, because what you’re really building isn’t just a pile of money, it’s a discipline that compounds over time just like the money itself does.
And the third one is where Bitcoin comes in: take those savings and put them into a hard asset that can’t be inflated away. This is the part that most people in traditional finance still don’t fully grasp, but it’s the whole reason we’re here. You can save diligently for twenty years, but if those savings are sitting in a currency that loses purchasing power every single year, you’re running on a treadmill.
Bitcoin is the hardest asset ever created — there will only ever be 21 million of them, nobody can print more, and no government can dilute your share of it. When you put your savings into Bitcoin, you’re not gambling on a number going up on a screen, you’re opting out of a system that is designed to erode your wealth over time and opting into one that is designed to preserve it.
So before you stress about whether $60K is the perfect entry or whether you should wait for $55K, zoom out and ask yourself whether these three fundamentals are in place. Because if they are, the entry price matters a lot less than you think, you’re just consistently converting your time and energy into the soundest money ever created, and over a long enough time horizon, that decision is going to look very, very good regardless of whether you started at $60K or $50K or $70K.
The Takeaway
If you’ve been saying “I’ll buy when it dips” for the last year or two, I want you to sit with this for a second, this was the dip. This was the moment you were describing to your friends, the scenario you were waiting for, the price you said would make you feel comfortable enough to finally act. And if you didn’t buy, I’m not here to make you feel bad about it, because like we talked about earlier, your brain was literally working against you the entire time. That’s not a failure of character, that’s just how humans are wired when fear and money are involved.
Now, I want to be honest with you. I have no idea what Bitcoin is going to do next week or next month. Nobody does. It could recover from here, it could grind sideways for a while, or it could go lower. That’s just the reality of markets, and anyone who tells you they know exactly where the price is headed is either lying or trying to sell you something. I’m not here to pretend I have a crystal ball, and I think it’s actually really important to sit with that uncertainty rather than trying to paper over it with false confidence.
But here’s the thing. That uncertainty is exactly why having a system matters so much more than trying to pick the perfect moment. Because if you’re waiting for the point where you feel certain that the bottom is in and the price is only going up from here, you’re going to be waiting forever. That moment of certainty never comes, not at $60K, not at $50K, not at any price. The people who build wealth in Bitcoin aren’t the ones who figured out the future, they’re the ones who accepted that they couldn’t predict it and built a plan that works regardless.
And this is where I think a lot of people get it backwards. They try to build the plan before they build the understanding, and that’s why the plan falls apart the second things get scary. Because if you don’t truly understand what you own, no plan in the world is going to save you when the price drops 40% and the headlines are telling you it’s all over. You’ll panic, you’ll sell at the worst possible time, and you’ll convince yourself you were smart for “cutting your losses” right before the recovery happens. I’ve seen it play out more times than I can count.
Real conviction doesn’t come from watching the price go up and feeling good about it. That’s easy, anyone can hold when they’re in profit. Real conviction comes from understanding the fundamentals so deeply that when the price goes down, your instinct isn’t to run, it’s to buy more.
It comes from understanding why 21 million is a number that can never change, why proof of work matters, why Bitcoin is different from everything else in this space, and why the monetary properties of this asset make it unlike anything that has ever existed before. When you have that level of understanding, a 40% drawdown doesn’t feel like the end of the world, it feels like the world is handing you a discount on the hardest money ever created.
So if I could give you two things to focus on coming out of this week, it would be these: first, build a system. Pick an amount, set up a recurring buy, automate it, and let it run regardless of what the price is doing. But second, and honestly this might be even more important, invest in your own education. Read the Bitcoin whitepaper. Study how monetary systems work. Understand what inflation actually does to your savings over decades. Learn why every fiat currency in history has eventually gone to zero. Because when you understand those things at a deep level, you stop needing someone like me to convince you to buy the dip, you’ll be the one who can’t believe everyone else isn’t buying it.
Whether the price goes up from here, goes down further, or chops around for the next six months, the combination of a solid plan and genuine understanding is what separates the people who build life-changing wealth from the people who are still watching from the sidelines five years from now wishing they’d started sooner.