Erik Finman
At the tender age of 12, Erik Finman began investing in bitcoin in 2011, when it was just $12 apiece. Through selling companies and other investments, he now has 403 bitcoins — worth more than $1 million. Erik, from Idaho, USA, told CNBC that he got a hot tip from hits brother Scott and a $1,000 gift from his grandmother. He now says he has amassed a fortune of 403 bitcoins! The cryptocurrency has been on a bit of a bumpy ride lately, but at this week's average price just shy of $2700 per Bitcoin, the now 18-year-old’s stash is worth $1.08 million and change.
Erik cashed out his first bitcoin investment back in 2013 and started Botangle, an online education company that provides tools for locating instructors in subjects they need or wish to learn about.
He wasn’t a fan of high school and convinced his parents, both Stanford Ph.D.’s, to let him drop out at 15.
His teachers clearly weren’t seeing his potential. “One teacher told me to drop out and work at McDonald’s because that was all I would amount to for the rest of my life. I guess I did the dropout part,” the young bitcoin millionaire said. He didn’t really want to go to college, either, and won a bet with his parents that if he was worth a million dollars by 18, he could skip it. He was, and so he did.
Bitcoin prices have soared more than 300% in the span of a year, with the bulk of the gain coming during May and June 2017. Bitcoin tapped $3,000 last week, before a pullback last week that saw it shed billions in market cap before climbing back up to current levels around $2700. Erik also has smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and ethereum which have also seen recent big gains in price.
Erik thinks its best days are still ahead. "Personally I think bitcoin is going to be worth a couple hundred thousand to a million dollars a coin," he said.
In fact HowMuch.net on recently put things into perspective and demonstrated that for all the buzz and excitement bitcoin has generated, it still has a long way to go to make a footprint on the world's financial system. At the time of writing, the current value of all the bitcoin in the world is worth about $43 billion, according to coinmarketcap.com. As their chart below shows, the largest global financial component is for all the fiat currency in the world — including bank deposits — which comes out to $83.6 trillion. All the stocks trading around the world, come in second at a total of $66.8 trillion, and more than double all the physical money in the world.
The point to note is that the value of all the cryptocurrencies in existence (Bitcoins + Altcoins), checks in at $100 billion, slightly ahead of Bill Gates who with a net worth of $86 billion is the richest man in the world. Moe perspective can be gleaned from the fact that the total US dollar value of all currently circulating Bitcoins is almost equal to the net worth of Google co-founder Larry Page, the 12th-richest on Forbes’ billionaires list.
That being said, bitcoin's growth rate has been on a tear recently and shows little sign of abating. Indeed, at the time of writing, the chart below from bitcoinforecast.com projects that the price per bitcoin may touch $6000 in the medium-long term (possibly before the end of 2017!).
BitcoinForecast.com
References:
- CNBC - http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/bitcoin-millionaire-erik-finman-says-going-to-college-isnt-worth-it.html
- Howmuch.net - https://howmuch.net/
- BitcoinForcast - http://www.bitcoinforecast.com/
