High school dropout invests in Bitcoin and becomes millionaire at 18

According to CNBC on the morning of the 21st Beijing time, American teenager Erik Finman made a bet with his parents that if he could become a millionaire by the age of 18, he would not be forced to go to college. Thanks to his savvy investment in Bitcoin and the soaring price of this digital currency, he won the bet.
“I can proudly say I did it and I don’t have to go to college anymore,” Finman said.
Finman now owns 403 bitcoins, worth a total of $1.09 million at current prices of about $2,700, and has previously made smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and Litecoin.
However, Bitcoin's price fluctuates wildly and its value can drop quickly. One technical analyst told CNBC that he believes Bitcoin will fall after reaching $2,800, but others believe that the price of Bitcoin will rise to $100,000 in 10 years.
Finman believes that the best days are still ahead. "I personally think that the price of Bitcoin will rise to hundreds of thousands or even $1 million."
Finman began investing in Bitcoin in May 2011, when he was just 12 years old, with a $1,000 gift from his grandmother and a tip from his brother Scott.
Finman grew up in a small town in Idaho. He was not a good student at school. A teacher even told him that he should drop out and work at McDonald's. That would be the end of his life. This made Finman very dissatisfied and frustrated. At the age of 15, he begged his parents to let him drop out of school.
Surprisingly, his parents agreed. Finman sold his first Bitcoin investment at $1,200 per coin in late 2013, making $100,000. He used the money to start an online education company called Botangle, which allows frustrated students like him to find teachers they like through video chat. He also used the funds to move to Silicon Valley and do some interesting things, including visiting Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, traveling around, and encountering a dangerous situation in Colombia, where he was pointed at a gun, but eventually used a mobile phone app he designed to call the local police and escape.
Not everyone took a 15-year-old entrepreneur seriously, though. Finman recalls meeting with a “very, very senior” Uber executive who wasn’t interested in hearing about Botangle and told him he’d never win the bet he made with his parents.
Finally, he found a buyer for Botangle's technology in January 2015. The investor offered him $100,000, or 300 bitcoins. At the time, the price of bitcoin had fallen to just over $200. But Finman still chose to accept bitcoin because he believed it was "the next big thing."
Since then, Finman has managed his own bitcoin investments while also working on other projects, including launching a rocket with NASA through the ELaNa program. The only thing he won’t do is go back to school.
While his family all have degrees — his older brother Scott attended Johns Hopkins at age 16 and now owns an enterprise software company, and his other brother Ross attended Carnegie Mellon at age 16 to study robotics and is now a doctoral student at MIT — Finman is content to learn about the real world from experience.
"I would not recommend the way the education system is structured right now. It doesn't work for everybody. I would recommend the internet, which is completely free. You can learn a million times more on YouTube and Wikipedia," he said.

China Finance Network