berniesanders The high school drop out who invested in bitcoin at $12 is now a millionaire at 18

This high school dropout who invested in bitcoin at $12 is now a millionaire at 18

A teenage bitcoin investor who turned $1,000 into more than five million dollars, and who says college isn’t worth it, is now turning his sights on Dubai. @erikfinman @berniesanders
Erik Finman made a bet with his parents that if he turned 18 and was a millionaire, they wouldn't force him to go to college. Thanks to his savvy investments in bitcoin and the current all-time high valuation, he won't have to get his degree.
"I can proudly say I made it, and I'm not going to college," Finman said.
The teen mogul from Idaho, US, first invested in the cryptocurrency in May 2011 at the age of 12, after his grandma gifted him $1,000 and a tip from his brother Scott
He currently owns 403 bitcoins, puts his bitcoin value at $1.09 million. He also has smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and ethereum. Bitcoin is very volatile, and the value could decline rapidly. A technical analyst told CNBC he believes bitcoin will only go up to $2,800 before the value recedes, while others think it may reach $100,000 in a decade.
Finman 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.
growing up in "small town" Idaho outside of Coeur d'Alene wasn't easy. Finman was especially frustrated with his high school teachers, and begged his parents to let him drop out at 15.

Erik made a bet with his parents that if he was a millionaire by the time he was 18, they wouldn’t force him to go to college.
"(High school) was pretty low quality," he said. "I had these teachers that were all kind of negative. 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."
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.
He also used the funds to move to Silicon Valley, did some fun things like meet Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and traveled.
"I really liked Colombia," he said. "It was fun, but a little sketchy. Some interesting stuff happened. I was held up at gunpoint there, which is pretty scary, but I have this emergency button I programmed in Android that puts you on speaker but turns off audio automatically and dials [a local emergency number]."
"Maybe I'll turn that into an app," he added. "It's handy."
It was hard getting people to take a 15-year-old tech entrepreneur seriously, Finman admitted. He recalled being called in to interview with a "really, really high-up" unnamed Uber executive, who instead of listening to his Botangle pitch discouraged him and told him he would never win the bet with his parents.
Eventually he found a buyer for Botangle's technology in January 2015. The investor offered either $100,000 or 300 bitcoin, which had dropped in value at that time to a little more than $200 a coin. He took the lower cash value bitcoin deal because he believed it was "the next big thing."
@randowhale

"My parents asked 'Why don't you take the more cash?"' Finman explained. "But I thought of it more of an investment."
His bitcoin investments and his forays into various start-ups helped ensure that he achieved that goal.
But even though he personally thinks college is a waste of time, he is nevertheless committed to developing an education system to help frustrated students like himself – and he thinks the UAE is the perfect place to base his project.
Erik now has ambitious plans to invest part of that wealth into creating a new university in Dubai which, he says, will be “two times better than Stanford” – where both his parents did their PhDs.
@good-karma

“I want to start the school of all schools in Dubai,” he told The National. “It will be the best on the planet, world-renowned – because I know Dubai likes the best.”
But Erik has plans to build an actual physical campus in Dubai which, he says, will be “Stanford 2.0 but even better – a very big and beautiful campus, with a modern design”.
His whole family is involved in the project, which they hope to launch in the next three years “or even sooner”.
“My brothers went to MIT and Johns Hopkins, my parents met doing their PhDs at Stanford, and I have the entrepreneurial side with my experience running an education company. So it’s really been a family project – we want to bring that combined Stanford, MIT, and start-up magic to Dubai.”
While he also considered Singapore and San Francisco for the new university, Erik is keenest on Dubai because he believes it has “overtaken New York to become the most international city in the world”.

@jerrybanfield

Aside from planning his education empire, and investing his bitcoin investments, Erik spends his time working with NASA to launch a Taylor Swift CD into space. The project with NASA is also fueled by his desire to motivate and inspire students. “We need to get more people talking about space,” he said.
Is Erik worried about the recent volatility in Bitcoin’s price? The simple answer is: “absolutely not”.
“For my own sanity, I don’t check the [price] that often anymore,” he said. “It changes all the time.
“But I think Bitcoin definitely has more to go, and I think cryptocurrency as a whole has a lot more to go. It’s the next big thing.
“The only way you can take down by Bitcoin is not through its own doing, but if you make some better alternative to it.
“Whatever the winning cryptocurrency is – and right now that’s Bitcoin – will get to millions of dollars of coin.”

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