A High School Dropout named Erik Finman invested his gift of $1000 from his GrandMother on Bitcoin when he was 12 Years Old.He made a bet with his parents that he would go to college if he is a Millionaire by the age of 18.
“I can proudly say I made it, and I’m not going to college,” Finman said
He currently holds 403 bitcoins, which at the current $2,700 a coin puts his bitcoin amount at $1.09 million. He also has smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and ethereum.
Bitcoin is very unstable, and the value could decrease rapidly. A technical analyst told CNBC he thinks bitcoin will only go up to $2,800 before the value drops, while others think it may reach $100,000 in a decade.
Finman thinks its best times are still ahead. “Personally I think bitcoin is going to be worth a several hundred thousand to a million dollars a coin,” he said.
Bitcoin and the blockchain technology it is built on allow people to cut out the broker, Finman explained. For example, an open source blockchain ride-share platform would allow users to power the service on their Mobiles using peer-to-peer technology without a central hub. It would allow the operators to get more money by cutting overhead costs, he added. It could also create the next evolution of the internet, one which wouldn’t be reliant on servers.
The first time, he transformed $1,000 into $100,000
Finman began buying bitcoin in May 2011 at the age of 12, thanks to a $1,000 gift from his grandmother and a tip from his brother Scott.
Though he’s close with his family — which he calls the “Elon Musk story of the Kardashians” — growing up in “small town” Idaho outskirts of Coeur d’Alene wasn’t easy. Finman was especially frustrated with his high school teachers and urged his parents to let him drop out at 15.
“High school was pretty low quality,” he said. “I had these teachers that did all kind of negative influence. One teacher told me to drop out and work at McDonald’s because that was all I would result to for the rest of my life. I guess I did the dropout part.”
Surprisingly, his parents who met pursuing their Ph.D.s at Stanford agreed. Finman sold his first bitcoin investments at the end of 2013, when they were valued at $1,200 a piece.
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