Erik Finman, the kid Bitcoin millionaire!
Erik Finman, the kid Bitcoin millionaire!
Erik Finman has a fascinating life story. He grew up in Idaho and, by all accounts, was frustrated with his high school teachers - so much so that he begged his parents to let him drop out. As the story goes, one of his teachers even told him to drop out and go and work at McDonald’s, because that was all he would ever do with his life.
When he was just 12, in May 2011, his older brother Scott showed him Bitcoin, back when a single coin was worth about $12, sending him 0,2 Bitcoin so that he could use the cryptocurrency. Later his grandmother gave him 1000 dollars as an Easter present, but instead of buying tons of toys or putting it all into a savings account, Erik bought more Bitcoin. A few years later, at the end of 2013, when a single Bitcoin was worth $12000, Erik decided it was time to sell, and turned his $1000 gift into $100 000.
According to Mashable, the then 15-year-old Erik used the proceeds to launch an online tutoring service called Botangle. By the time Mashable noticed him, his business already had 20 employees and over 100 active users, who were probably part of his target audience: frustrated students looking for specific teachers for Online tutoring. At that point Erik Finman made it clear that he did not plan to go to college, making a bet with his parents and saying: “I actually have a deal with my parents that if I make a million dollars before I turn 18, I don’t have to go to college. I’ll do it or die trying.” Separately, CNBC later reported that he also used part of his money to move to Silicon Valley. There he met interesting people, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and was also held up at gunpoint and got away thanks to an emergency button he had built into his Android phone. He also met an unnamed Uber executive who talked him out of it and told him that he would lose the bet with his Parents.
In the end the young entrepreneur did not give up, and sold Botangle’s technology at the beginning of 2015. The investor gave him two options: 300 bitcoins (each worth a little over 200 dollars at the time) or 100 000 dollars in fiat. Erik chose Bitcoin, because he believed in its future. From that moment on, most of what Erik does is manage his Bitcoin investments and work on various projects, such as NASA’s ELaNa project.
Finman managed to win the bet with his parents, since he now owns 403 bitcoins (worth about 1,09 million dollars), and also has small investments in other cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin and Ethereum. The young entrepreneur believes that Bitcoin’s best days are still ahead. He states: Personally, I think Bitcoin will be worth several hundred thousand to a million dollars a coin.
In the end Finman never finished school and never sat the State exam (the Equivalent of our own Matriculation exams). By his own account he sees no value in it, since the point of it would have been to find a job later on. He taught himself how to run a business and has been quoted as saying: “Instead of writing essays in English class, I had to write emails to important people”. His brother Scott, who introduced him to Bitcoin when he was 12, now has an enterprise software company, after going to Johns Hopkins University at 16. His other brother Ross, who enrolled at Carnegie Melon College for robotics, is now doing a doctorate at MIT /Massachusetts Institute of Technology/. Even so, Erik sees little value in the current education system.
“The way the education system is structured now, I wouldn’t recommend it. It doesn’t work for anyone. I would recommend the internet, which is free.”
So says the youngest known Bitcoin Millionaire in the History of Cryptocurrencies.
