You should not.
But I take advantage of this question to elaborate a more articulated speech.
Some people ask me: "should I buy bitcoin?" Or: "is it a good time to buy?" My first answer is: "I am a tech guy, not a financial advisor".
If they insist, the answer is: "it's never a good time to buy bitcoin, but it's always a good time to buy bitcoins!".
I explain below the meaning of this apparently meaningless phrase.
It's never a good time if you don't know what it is, how it works and why it works. Simply put, don't buy what you don't know. It applies to everything: your money is precious.
Do not be advised by anyone, think with your head and VERIFY.
It's always a good time to buy bitcoins if, after studying a bit, you want to buy fractions of bitcoins - as we have seen, the real basic value unit of the system is the satoshi (sat) - because you have realized that your current money is not as valuable as you thought: never buy everything at once and in periods of growth in value, but rather buy a little at a time (eg the value of a pack of cigarettes a week) possibly in periods of decline, regardless of current value of the single bitcoin.
What if the Bitcoin experiment fails? You will lose the investment! Therefore never spend what you are not willing to lose.
Are you willing to invest your hard-earned savings on what is today a bet on the future? Not me. If instead you want to spend a pack of cigarettes a week, if you are a smoker it is also healthy!
However, the initial question allows us to analyze the concept of volatility a little bit.
Far be it from me to dwell on concepts proper to an economic text - Saifedean Ammous's The Bitcoin Standard is certainly more useful in this sense - let's see briefly why Bitcoin's volatility is not necessarily bad.
When we are dealing with a volatile asset we are led to believe that its price always goes in the wrong direction and that it does so from when we bought it: if we buy today, this asset will surely lose value starting from tomorrow, so it's not worth buying. As if the direction taken by the curve on the graph depended on us. In fact it can also be partly true.
If we buy a highly speculative asset and we do it at a time of hype, ie market excitement ( FOMO ), we will contribute to the creation of the speculative bubble and we will almost certainly suffer the consequences, which, in finance, are the ruinous fall in the price followed by periods of decline ( Bear market ) and liquidation at a loss, because the typical reasoning of those who improvise "traders" is: "if the value has fallen, it will fall again, so it is better to go out at a loss and recover a little something".
Tell the truth: you find yourself with what was said above, right?
It almost always happens when you approach Bitcoin from a speculative point of view, before moving on to the study of technology.
In Bitcoin, you pay for volatility, but you do it only when you exit the investment to limit your losses.
This volatility, however, can also be ridden if, as we have said before, we buy few satoshis at a time and with constancy, regardless of the price of the single bitcoin.
If we go to dcabtc.com and set a weekly investment of 5 dollars, for example, we can see how many sats we would have accumulated in a variable period and how much we would have exploited the volatility in the exchange with the Dollar.
We make things more interesting.
In 2017 there was the big Bitcoin bubble, which brought the price of the single BTC from around 1,000 usd in April, to 18.700 in December, before breaking out ruinously, until the value of the single bitcoin reached 3,500 USD in February 2019.
Even now, when I talk about Bitcoin, there is always someone who says: "I - or a friend of mine, or an acquaintance ... the subject changes from time to time - I lost a lot of money with that Bitcoin!".
Well, let's use dcabtc.com again and see how this bubble could be ridden without loss. We set an investment of 5 USD weekly, the accumulation for two years and the start two years ago (from August 2017 to August 2019). Although we had begun to invest in full bubble, today we would have around 8 million satoshis and an increase in value in USD of about 35% compared to what we invested. We would have spent a total of 500 dollars and now we would have had 700 USD, despite the fact that the current bitcoin price is 10,000 USD (August 2019) while in December 2017 we bought for 18,000 dollars.
What if we had limited the investment to just one year?
Well, we would have lost about 10% of our investment, rather than 40% we would have lost if we had invested everything while bitcoin was worth 18,000 USD. This investment strategy is called Dollar Cost Averaging * and consists of investing a certain amount of money on a regular basis rather than at the same time.
In this way we minimize the risk by removing a variable, namely short-term volatility, and the emotional element, because we are no longer forced to monitor the price of the single bitcoin while waiting to find the right time to invest.
*The information shown above does not constitute a financial advisory service in any way. The proposed analyzes cannot in any way replace the free and informed judgment of the investor, which always and exclusively acts at his own risk.