People talk very often about the rules of investment and these have of course spilt over into the land of crypto and they are designed to cover and protect us from major losses and becoming victims of our own greed. The Golden rule of course is:

Thou shalt not invest in what thouest isn't prepared to lose

Or in simple language be prepared to lose everything that you invest. I have been thinking about this recently and I have observed a potential psychological trap that I am in danger of falling into and I thought it was worth the time to share it with the community. It may be that I am not alone in this observation and how it affects my behaviour and particularly towards "failing assets".

The psychological construct is very simple.

If I am prepared to lose it, I don't hold on to it or cherish it as much as I should and therefore I am in danger of becoming negligent in my care of it.

I am currently going through something in my personal life - that I am unable to go into here - and because I am not prepared to lose it under any circumstance I do whatever i can to hold onto and cherish it. 

The proposition itself does make sense and there might be an endgame when everything is lost, but the point is a preparedness to lose something is a dereliction of due diligence. Let me give first a negative example and then a positive example.

The Negative Example.

I have commented a lot on my BAND holdings and even used the phrase "I have written them off", but this actually means I am ignoring them and waiting for them to die. I think it was a week or so ago when I stated that mainly through price depreciation but also through some poor decision making, when trying to acquire more BAND during a dip (that ended up continuing to dip) that my holdings are now worth 1% of what I invested in them. Well since then they have crashed even further and are now worth only 75% of what they were worth a week ago. The maths is easy, as follows -

Now, if I apply the rule and see how it affects my behaviour. Frankly I have given up hope on my BAND and I am expecting it to disappear down the toilet like the pile of s**t that it is proving to be. But this is negligence on my part. Surely I would be better off moving what I have left into something more attractive. For example, Coinbase offer Ethereum staking at approximately 2%, not a lot admittedly, but if I moved last week I would have 1% of my investment left and it would be staking. If I move today my money is even less. The bottom line is "because I am prepared to lose it I am not going to do anything proactive to save it" - just in case it bounces back. We all know by now that for such a project that Chainlink is a far better prospect.

The Positive Example.

I know this is almost a moot point, because the freebitco.in faucet is closing down any time soon and that is exactly the point. I have spent about four years steadily adding BitCoin sats by rolling the faucet wheel as and when convenient fully aware that their minimum pay out is 30,000 sats. Just before Christmas I saw that I was about 1140 sats short of the magic 30,000 and I was (and am) worried that despite the amount of time I have taken to build up the sats, that it will in the end be pointless because I will not be eligible to claim. So I set myself a target based on a realistic number of rolls that I thought would be achievable in a day, but at the same time I moved my freebitco.in activity to my mobile phone. Based on 5 rolls a day returning a single sat the target my calculations gave me was 8 August 2026, but with the aid of maybe 4 or five second tier rolls (with between 22 and 30 sats depending on the price of BitCoin) I have brought that target down to (at the time of writing) 31 March 2026, saving more than four months on my original projection and there is a realistic prospect of my achieving my goal before the end of February at this rate with only 250 sats to go.

My point is that, while I accepted the possibility of losing these sats, and while I also know that they are not the truest example as they do not represent any monetary investment, they still represent assets that I am holding (and "prepared to lose"). The difference is that I am nurturing, cherishing and looking after them to do the best not to lose them. It might amount to nothing, but who knows? 

And yes maybe it was the scare that motivated me.

The bottom line, looking at both examples is my attitude towards being prepared to lose what I have invested. People by our very nature are lazy and passivity is tantamount to negligence. Just because we are prepared to lose it doesn't mean that we should just quietly accept its loss.

Maybe I will simply move my BAND as proposed. It's worth s**t and may bounce back, but even a little bit of staked Ethereum is a better long term prospect then what is happening now.

Food for thought everybody.

As always stay safe and well my friends.