For over a decade, cryptocurrencies have acted as a catalyst for a headstart in the finance world. Just by investing a fraction of their income and following Bitcoin news closely, the lives of the investors featured below have changed completely.
Kane Ellis
This story is an example of what can happen when you follow the Bitcoin price chart and have a bit of luck and faith. Kane Ellis was an 18-year-old high school dropout, who discovered Bitcoins when working in IT. From his tech skills, he decided to set up his computer to mine while still working at his day job. In the beginning, he only earned four Bitcoins a day. Today, he has accomplished what many dreams of. Owning a Maserati GranTurismo.
The New York Post says that he has been able to start his own car business, where most of his money is held in cryptocurrency. Since he began at 18, he encourages others to think long-term when investing in Bitcoin.
Erik Finman
Erik Finman became the youngest millionaire by investing in Bitcoin at the ripe age of 18. He was just a kid from Idaho who dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco at 17. He began his Bitcoin journey when he was 12, investing in Bitcoin with $1000 he had borrowed from his grandmother. Luckily, it was worth it for him, as the value of Bitcoin grew from $12 to $1200 just two years later.
A good lesson from this story is that he didn’t fall victim to over-speculation, which is one of the trends the industry should avoid this year. By 2015, he sold his education company and is now focusing on his Bitcoin projects.
Charlie Shrem
Another young billionaire goes by the name of Charlie Shrem. Hailing from New York, he already had a good nose for financing. While in high school, he founded a start-up company, Epiphany Design & Production, which was fixing printers and computers. When he became a senior in college, he began investing in Bitcoin. Unfortunately, he was met with obstacles in the beginning. He lost all his Bitcoins, as the service he was using crashed. Frustrated with the service, he founded his own Bitcoin company called BitInstant with his friends.
BitInstant grew fast and was processing almost a third of all Bitcoin transactions. Today, funding for cryptocurrency has plunged, but as we have seen with this example, sometimes taking risks can be good.
Su Zhu
A successful Bitcoin story often begins with two good friends who get a great business idea and decides to run with it. This is the case of Su Zhu from Singapore. He used to work as a trader for Flow Traders, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse alongside his high school friend Kyle Davies.
In 2012, Zhu and Davies founded Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a crypto hedge fund based in Singapore. In the following years, 3AC grew and became one of the biggest trading funds worldwide. Even though 3AC declared bankruptcy in 2022, Su Zhu became a millionaire and achieved a cult following on Twitter.
Peter Saddington
2011 became a life-changing year for 35-year-old Peter Saddington, an entrepreneur from Atlanta. This year, he heard about cryptocurrency for the first time and bought bitcoins for $3 a coin. He hit the news in 2017 when he was one of the first people to buy a Lamborghini with bitcoins.
His purchase was a 2015 Lamborghini for 45 bitcoins or $238,000. The 45 bitcoins only cost him $115. Saddington wanted to prove that bitcoins can be used for actual purchases in an attempt to spread the word that regular people can also use bitcoins. Today, he runs a cryptocurrency social network.
Featured image credit: Unsplash
