I’m working my way through the Gutenberg collection at the moment. Stumbled across “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. Read it decades ago, and while Hesse gets tagged as young adult reading, it’s worth revisiting.
But I didn’t want to write about Hermann Hesse here, or Stefan Zweig (whose complete works I’m also devouring on Gutenberg — pure pleasure). I wanted to write about crypto. The connection sits with Siddhartha, who in his middle years takes a job knowing almost nothing, yet succeeds spectacularly with his simple mantra: “I can think, wait and fast.”
Now that Bitcoin has crashed hard and will likely crash further, I remember Siddhartha. Should have listened to him.
I didn’t think enough, couldn’t wait, and definitely didn’t fast — I invested heavily during the downturn from the peak. Managed to sell most of it in time, thankfully. But I’m still holding coins that I’ll probably need to hold for a very long time before they recover.
Patience and risk management. That’s what separates the professional from the weekend warrior (or gambler). Unlike the panic merchants who now think crypto is finished long-term, I believe in a comeback. I’m actually looking forward to the collapse and want to dive as deep and fast as possible into technical analysis, ready for the next bull run.
Until then: think, wait, fast. And save.
Originally published auf Deutsch at reinergaertner.de (est. 1997, older than Google). AI helped translate this. I helped introduce the errors.