[Hankey]

Idaho teenager becomes millionaire by investing $1,000 gift in Bitcoin - and wins bet with his parents

Three years ago Erik Finman made a bet with his parents. He had just dropped out of high school, finding it a waste of time, and was being taught at home. If he was a millionaire by the time he turned 18, his parents said, they would not force him to go to university.

Last week Mr Finman declared victory.

“I won the million dollar bet I had with my parents!” he announced on Tuesday. “Grateful to all the friends, family, and mentors along the way.”

The teenager’s story has captivated America, delighting people with its mix of childhood ambition, entrepreneurial skills and hard work. Mr Finman has been celebrated on news channels, and lauded in the tech community. For his story is little short of remarkable.

The tale began in 2011, when he was 12, and his grandmother gave him $1,000.

Mr Finman, whose parents Paul and Lorna met at Stanford University in the 1980s, when Paul was getting his PhD in electrical engineering and Lorna was getting hers in physics, took the cash and invested it in Bitcoin, following a tip from his brother Scott.

The Finman siblings, three brothers, admit to being fiendishly competitive. Erik describes his family as being the "Elon Musk version of the Kardashians" – both his older brothers work in tech and engineering, and the youngest Finman was frustrated by school.

“I was a failure by most metrics,” he has said of that time. “I wasn’t the most studious of teenagers, I played Call of Duty and I snuck in Grand Theft Auto so my parents didn’t see.

“My life was pretty average at that point. No matter how hard I tried, it was to no avail. I still got Cs, I still was afraid to talk my teachers who made my failures seem like a bad thing and I just wasn’t motivated.”

He claimed one of his teachers told him he would never amount to anything, so he should drop out of school and work at McDonald’s.

Perhaps surprisingly, his parents listened to his complaints and withdrew him from school, home schooling him in rural Idaho.

In 2013 Mr Finman cashed in the first of his bitcoin investments, when they were valued at $1,200 a piece. His $1,000 investment was now worth a hundred times his grandmother’s gift.

With the cash, the teenager launched an online education company called Botangle, which would allow frustrated students like him to find teachers over video chat. Before starting the company, he went to a Starbucks and offered to buy anyone a coffee if they would listen to his idea and give feedback – 20 people did.

Buoyed by the launch of his first company, he spread his wings and begun interning at Silicon Valley start-ups. At the age of 15, he moved to San Francisco.


Mr Finman now owns 403 bitcoins, which at the current rate of $2,700 a coin puts his bitcoin value at $1.09 million. He also has smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and ethereum.

Despite the volatility of the virtual currency, he is hanging onto it – believing its value will continue to rise.

Mr Finman told NBC he is currently working on multiple projects, including with Nasa to launch a rocket through the ELaNa project, designed to attract and recruit students to their teams.

And he has no regrets about not going to university.

"The way the education system is structured now, I wouldn't recommend it," he said.

"It doesn't work for anyone.

“I would recommend the internet, which is all free. You can learn a million times more off YouTube and Wikipedia."

[Santos F.C.]

Essa porra está acabando com o mercado de placas de vídeo, as placas da AMD sumiram das prateleiras!

[Kaa]

Antes do fim do ano sai placa otimizada pra isso

[zero_0592]

Essa porra está acabando com o mercado de placas de vídeo, as placas da AMD sumiram das prateleiras!

e as nvidia subiram consideravelmente de preço

filhos da puta

[king]

ó o preço BTC caindo,

até comprei um pouco hoje

[Hankey]

Ethereum is crashing by 20% right now after confidence in bitcoin rival shaken

• Ethereum plunged more than 20 percent in Monday trading.
• Ripple effects from a flash crash on one exchange last week was a driving force behind the drop.
• Unsubstantiated rumors about the digital currency's founder contributed to the uncertainty.

Bitcoin rival ethereum plunged Monday despite a major exchange's efforts to shore up confidence by announcing a credit for customers who lost money during last week's flash crash.

Ethereum, also known as ether, traded 20.9 percent lower at $239.63 Monday afternoon, according to CoinDesk.

Last Wednesday, ethereum briefly plunged in a flash crash from above $300 to 10 cents on Coinbase's GDAX exchange. On Friday, the exchange said it would credit customers who "experienced a margin call or stop loss order" on GDAX during the flash crash.

GDAX reported Monday afternoon, ET, a temporary halt in trading for all products, which was resolved within an hour.

Ethereum one-day performance

Ethereum is still up about 2 percent for June, and 2,500 percent for the year, according to CoinDesk data. At its peak, ethereum had surged more than 4,000 percent for the year.

An unsubstantiated rumor Sunday that ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin had died also reportedly hit ethereum's price for a brief period. Ethereum fell from around $329 to a low of $284 Sunday before recovering, according to CoinDesk. Buterin tweeted a picture of himself Sunday evening, ET, to dispel the rumor.

William Mougayar, author of "The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology," said he did not believe the rumor was the main factor behind ethereum's decline.

"We need to see a full 24 hour cycle in order to fully assess what is actually happening," he said in an email to CNBC. "These cryptocurrencies are traded globally, especially with a large amount of activity coming from China, so I'm waiting to see what happens around 6PM EST this evening."

Digital currency investors also pointed to the reversal of last week's exuberance stemming from the launch of several ethereum-based projects, which ended up clogging the network. The inability of ethereum to handle the orders raised worries that digital currency may soon face a debate over an upgrade model, similar to a heated controversy over bitcoin's future that has weighed on that currency.

Two different methods for upgrading bitcoin, SegWit2x and BIP148, are set to go into effect July 21 and Aug. 1, respectively. Initially the systems were incompatible, threatening to split bitcoin in two and likely reducing its value. However, a developer announced earlier this month a way to make the two methods compatible, helping bitcoin recover from lows of the month.

Bitcoin traded nearly 5 percent lower Monday around $2,452, still up about 5 percent for the month and 153 percent higher for the year, according to CoinDesk.

In a blog post Monday, digital currency investor and Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson said the decline in ethereum was profit-taking after a massive run higher in the last six months.

"My gut says we are headed for a selloff in the crypto sector," he said in the post. But he said he remains optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies over the next five to 10 years.

[Botafogo]

to achando que bitcoin vai romper essa congestão pra baixo semana que vem e vai ter uma boa queda lá pros 2000 novamente

acabei de vender todos meus bitcoins a 2500, como meu preço médio estava bem baixo já que to comprando desde 1200 realizei um bom lucro

umas coisas técnicas vão dificultar as transações a partir da semana que vem, BIP 148, BIP 149

volto ao lado comprador quando as coisas esclarecerem melhor

[Hankey]

Vendeu quantos Pedro?

[Hankey]

Bitcoin Battered Below $2000, Ether Tumbles As August 1st Scaling Deadline Looms

[king]

to ligaids, aumentei um pouco meus BTC, ou vou me fuder mesmo, mas nem ligo, deixa vida me levar

ETH eu vendi, quando ultrapassou 400 dollar e começou a cair devagar, dei vender em tudo. nao entendo nada de nada, mas todo lugar que eu lia dizia que ETH é furada

[Hankey]

Hacker Allegedly Steals $7.4 Million in Ethereum with Incredibly Simple Trick

[Foo Lang III]

[Qwerty]

E aí, compro ou não compro? Porque se eu seguir o McAfee aí eu com 200 reais vou ganhar 100 mil.

[Mota Offspring]

A empresa que ele é presidente trabalha com mineração de bitcoin, nada mais natural que ele querer criar uma euforia em cima do futuro do bitcoin e criptomoedas em geral

Inclusive é uma mensagem pra tentar estancar a sangria

[Botafogo]

bitcoin ainda tem muitas dificuldades técnicas pra superar no que se refere a escala, enquanto não resolverem os problemas vai gerar incerteza que é ruim pro preço

toda a rede bitcoin hoje só aguenta 7 transações por segundo, redes Visa e Mastercard aguentam mais de 50 mil transações por segundo

dá pra ter uma idéia de como bitcoin ainda tem muito pra melhorar

não se sabe se é possível melhorar dentro do bitcoin ou se outra moeda nova terá que surgir para arrumar isso daí vem a incerteza que afeta o preço

se conseguirem melhorar dentro do bitcoin aí o preço pode continuar subindo, se tiverem que criar uma nova moeda aí o preço de bitcoin vai cair podendo até ir pra zero se a nova moeda substituir tudo

quando você ler por aí hard fork entenda que é uma nova moeda sendo criada

[queito]

[Pipoteca]

>izzynobre
>9:56

Passo

[Lão]

meu primo é CEO da FoxBit.. sempre me interessei por Bitcoin des de 2010 / 2011 porem nunca dei o passo final para investir... sempre penso em usar uma boa quantia de grana para investir mas sempre deixo pra depois kkkkk

[Bruceexx]

um ponto negativo é o aumento do preço das placas, vo te que esperar pra pegar minha 1060

[Hankey]

O valor de mercado do Bitcoin acaba de ultrapassar todo o real em circulação no Brasil
Existe o equivalente a R$ 221 bilhões em bitcoins, mas R$ 219 bilhões em cédulas e moedas de real

O Bitcoin vem batendo recordes a cada semana, tendo quadruplicado seu preço nos primeiros oito meses de 2017. A criptomoeda valia US$ 959 em 1º de janeiro, ultrapassou os US$ 2.000 em maio, chegou a US$ 3.000 há apenas uma semana e acabou de atingir o patamar histórico de US$ 4.000. O que poucos notaram é que o valor de mercado do Bitcoin ultrapassou todo o real em circulação no Brasil.

A moeda digital atingiu cotação de US$ 4.263 na manhã desta segunda-feira (14). Como existem 16,5 milhões de bitcoins minerados até o momento, o valor de mercado da criptomoeda é de US$ 70,37 bilhões, o equivalente a R$ 220,88 bilhões. Em comparação, o meio circulante nacional é de R$ 218,69 bilhões, de acordo com os números do Banco Central.

Isso significa que, se você juntar todas as cédulas e moedas de real que estão em poder do público e da rede bancária no país, não é possível comprar todos os bitcoins que já foram emitidos pelos mineradores. Em outras palavras, Bitcoin vale mais que dinheiro, como diria Silvio Santos.

Serão minerados 21 milhões de bitcoins até o ano 2140, quando a produção se encerrará. A quantidade de moedas cresce mais lentamente a cada quatro anos: um novo bloco, que registra as transações na blockchain, é descoberto a cada 10 minutos e gera uma recompensa aos mineradores, que era de 50 BTC em 2009, passou para 25 BTC em 2012 e 12,5 BTC em 2016. 78,6% dos bitcoins já foram emitidos.

Junto com o crescimento, o Bitcoin enfrenta o avanço de outras centenas de criptomoedas. A moeda pioneira representa 50,4% do mercado de US$ 140 bilhões, mas já foi mais expressiva, detendo mais de 80% de participação durante cinco anos. O valor de mercado do Bitcoin é seguido de perto pelo Ethereum (US$ 28,36 bilhões), Ripple (US$ 6,62 bilhões) e pelo recém-criado Bitcoin Cash (US$ 5,07 bilhões).