Let me tell you a story of a young boy who did just that.

It all started back when Erik Finman was just 12 years old. It was May of 2011 and Erik had just received a $1,000 gift from his grandmother. (Nice gift eh?)

At the advice of his older brother Scott, Erik invested that money in Bitcoin when it was trading around $12 per coin.

At the time, Erik was very frustrated with his teachers in Idaho. He described them as pretty "low quality". Saying that one even told him to drop out and start working at McDonald's because that was likely where he would end up anyways.

Erik begged his parents to let him drop out. He even made a deal with them that if they let him drop out of high school, he would be a millionaire by the time he was 18 years old, and if he was not he would go back and finish school and then go to college. 

Surprisingly, his parents took him up on his bet. 

Which is even more surprising considering his parents met while pursuing their Ph.D.s at Standford University. As you can imagine education was likely very important to them. 

Roughly two years later at the the end of 2013, Erik sold his Bitcoin investment for roughly $1200 per coin. Which represents roughly a 100X return on his original $1,000 investment. Which turned his original $1,000 into over $100,000. 

Erik made his first $100,000 when he was just 14 years old.

Using that $100,000 Erik started an online Education Company called "Botangle". The goal of the company was to connect frustrated kids (like himself) with higher quality teachers.

The company didn't immediately take off but it also didn't flop either. 

He spent the next year or so pitching his company to different investors. One of them being one of the higher ups at Uber. 

Erik said that he was pretty frustrated with the executive not even really taking him seriously because he was only 15 years old and basically told him he would eventually have to go back to school. Not really even listening to his business pitch about Botangle.

Eventually a year or so later, Erik found a buyer for his Botangle company in 2015. The buyer offered him one of two options. 

He was offered $100,000 cash or 200 Bitcoins for the sale of his company. (At the time Bitcoins were trading around $200 per coin.)

Just about everyone (including his family) was telling him to take the $100,000 cash offer as it offered roughly $40k more in value.

Instead, Erik took the 200 Bitcoins saying that he believed in the technology and believed "Bitcoin was going to be the next big thing." He looked at the sale as more of an investment in his future than anything else.

(Why he didn't take the $100,000 cash and then just buy bitcoins with it is beyond me. You would think he would have been able to amass more than the 200 he was getting, but that is a question for another day I guess)

For the next several years, Erik managed his Bitcoin investment as well as a couple other smaller projects on the way to amassing the roughly 400 Bitcoins that he owns currently. At the current price of $2700 per coin, his Bitcoin holdings are worth over $1 million USD. 

He did it!

He proved to his parents that he could be a millionaire by the time he was 18 years old by dropping out of high school and by not going to college, and Bitcoin made all that possible.

I imagine there are several stories out there like Erik Finman's. Perhaps not the dropping out of school part, but about Bitcoin making young people large amounts of money when the rest of the world told them it wasn't possible. 

Regarding his current thoughts on Bitcoin...

Erik thinks it's best days are still in front of it. In fact his price predictions are similar to that of some other pretty well know analysts.

Erik had this to say regarding future prices:

"Personally I think Bitcoin is going to be worth a couple hundred thousand to a million dollars per coin (at some point)."

And then this regarding the technology itself:

"Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that it's built on allow people to cut out the middleman. An open source blockchain ride-sharing platform would allow users to power the service on their phones using peer-to-peer technology without a central hub. Which would allow the drivers to make more money by cutting overhead costs. It also would help create the next evolution of the internet, one which wouldn't be reliant on servers."

So, there you have it. A 12 year old boy from Idaho takes Grandma's gift of $1,000 and turns it into over a million dollars by the time he is 18 years old. 

All the while dropping out of high school and not going to to college. 

Overall, I would say he got pretty lucky and this outcome is likely not the norm for the kind of risks he took. However, good for him that he was able to chase his dreams and make them a reality.

I wouldn't take this as an endorsement to drop out of school for all you youngsters out there. Remember those commercials... Stay in school!

Perhaps the message to be taken from all this is to take some risks on the side and to not always follow the status quo. 

Stay informed my friends!

Sources:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/bitcoin-millionaire-erik-finman-says-going-to-college-isnt-worth-it.html

Image Sources:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/bitcoin-boy-erik-finman.html

http://notsosimplehousewife.blogspot.com/2011/06/schools-out-forever.html

https://www.inc.com/bill-carmody/how-to-make-the-impossible-possible.html

Follow me: @jrcornel