Are you thinking of investing in crypto?
While investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies carries an element of risk, there is the potential to make a tremendous return on your investment.
If you’re hesitant about investing in Bitcoin, this article is for you. Today, I will highlight several Bitcoin success stories that will motivate and inspire you to start investing in crypto yourself.
The short version: People like Erik Finman have managed to make millions by investing in Bitcoin early, but people who hopped on the train later also managed to see success, and you can too!
Read on to see the full stories.
(Disclaimer: This does not constitute investment advice. Any investing you do is at your own risk.).
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Bitcoin Success Stories to Inspire You
1. Erik Finman
One of the most impressive success stories with Bitcoin is that of Erik Finman. Erik has been dubbed the teenage Bitcoin millionaire due to his success at amassing a vast wealth with Bitcoin at a young age.
At the tender age of 12, Erik decided he didn’t want to attend college. He didn’t even want to continue with high school – he hated it so much that he wanted to drop out.
However, everyone told him that he would amount to nothing if he did that. One teacher said to him that he would be doomed to work in fast food if he didn’t continue with his studies.
His parents agreed to allow him to drop out of his studies and skip college, though, if he managed to invest $1,000 that he received from his grandmother and turn it into a whopping $1 million.
Of course, they never imagined that he would actually be able to accomplish such a feat. Turning $1,000 into 1 million is such an impressive ROI that it was virtually unheard of and practically impossible at the time, especially for such a young teenager.
However, what they didn’t know was that Bitcoin was still in its infancy and had the potential for tremendous growth. People just hadn’t heard of Bitcoin yet, and if they did hear of it, they usually dismissed it as some sort of fad.
Erik first learned about Bitcoin after seeing someone wear a Bitcoin shirt at a protest. The guy who wore the shirt told him it will end Wall Street, and it piqued his interest.
The young boy was determined to get out of his study responsibilities, and he used that $1,000 to purchase cryptocurrencies, mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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Photo by Karolina Grabowska, Pexels
He invested in Bitcoin when it was worth just $12! He finally became a millionaire in 2017.
Since then, Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated, often hovering at around $20,000 but sometimes going up to double and even triple that.
The days of Bitcoin being just $12 are long over, but it is still possible to make good money with Bitcoin due to the way it fluctuates – you can easily double, triple, or quadruple your investment or even more!
Besides, it’s possible that Bitcoin will go well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means that the potential return on investment is a lot higher than you may think.
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2. Olaf Carlson-Wee
Photo via Olaf Carlson-Wee, Linkedin
Olaf Carlson-Wee is an American entrepreneur who made a fortune from Bitcoin investments.
He was the first employee of Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency platform.
He got in early and made it big, but it wasn’t just that. He continued to invest heavily in crypto and generated a lot of wealth.
Olaf founded a blockchain investment company called Polychain Capital, and his crypto hedge fund went from $4 million in assets to $300 million, reaching a claimed $1 billion at one point.
His success launched him to the 30 Under 30 Forbes list, and he has plans to help change the world through cryptocurrency.
His net worth grew to an estimated $600 million, according to Forbes. However, that wealth didn’t come from Bitcoin alone but rather from a deeper understanding of the overall crypto market.
In 2017, there were a lot of ICOs – Initial Coin Offerings. These were like IPOs, and they gave people a chance to invest in potential cryptocurrency projects that were soon to be launched.
Olaf capitalized the ICO craze of the time, investing strategically in projects that had good potential, and he earned a lot of money from that.
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3. The Winklevoss Twins
cellanr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are identical twins who made it big in crypto together. Their journey is actually quite an interesting one, as it started with a feud with Mark Zuckerberg over who really came up with the idea for Facebook.
That’s because Tyler and Cameron founded HarvardConnection, later called ConnectU. They sued Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that he stole the idea for Facebook from them.
From that lawsuit, the brothers earned $65 million in a settlement. Guess what they did with that money?
That’s right – they invested it in Bitcoin. Well, they didn’t invest all of it in Bitcoin, but according to Forbes, they own around 70,000 Bitcoins together.
Considering the price of Bitcoin today, that is a huge amount of money! Not only that, but they own other cryptocurrencies as well.
The brothers went on to found Gemini, a well-known cryptocurrency exchange that processes around $70 million in crypto trades every day.
4. Cooper Turley
Photo via Danny Nelson, Coindesk
Cooper Turley is a “crypto bro” who became a millionaire in his 20s, allowing him to retire early and enjoy life.
According to CNBC, he started investing in crypto in around 2017. At that time, Bitcoin was trading at approximately $2,000, and Ethereum was trading at a few hundred dollars.
That is actually relatively late when you consider many of the other crypto success stories. For example, we saw how Erik Finman became rich by investing when Bitcoin was worth just $12, and we all know that those days are long gone.
However, at a few hundred dollars for Ethereum, Cooper was still able to make it big. That means that there is still an opportunity for you, too, to make it big!
In 2022, for example, Ethereum dropped to around $1,000, and there is definitely the potential for it to drop below $1,000 again. The trick is just to monitor the crypto markets and jump in when it does drop to such low prices.
While it might not drop to a few hundred dollars, the potential for wealth generation is still there.
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You might think that he must have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a millionaire if he only started at that time. However, that is not the case at all.
In fact, Cooper invested small, and many of you will have the ability to do the same as well. What is most surprising is that, at the time, the young investor was actually in college!
He was working random jobs here and there but pooled together his resources to invest a few hundred dollars at the times when he could afford it. If he could do it as a college student, so can you!
He was also entirely self-taught. He had a yearning for knowledge about blockchain technology, DeFi, and other cryptocurrency-related protocols and technologies.
That just shows that you don’t need to buy expensive training courses or invest in costly crypto trading schemes or platforms. All you need to do is educate yourself and invest what you can.
5. Valery Vavilov
Next on our list is Valery Vavilov, who founded BitFury.
BitFury is a startup that mines Bitcoin. Digital currency mining doesn’t involve using physical tools to mine the earth.
Instead, it is a process that refers to using complex mathematical equations to solve the problems that the Bitcoin blockchain generates. Solving these equations helps verify and add blocks of transactions to the blockchain.
By successfully solving these equations and verifying the blocks, you help keep the Bitcoin blockchain running. This helps ensure that the blockchain can remain decentralized, and so the blockchain awards miners with Bitcoin as payment.
This process is a whole new topic in itself, as it is essential to the decentralization of blockchain technology.
Of course, solving these complex equations is not easy, and you can’t do it by yourself. You need advanced technology and computer algorithms to do so.
So, Valery founded BitFury, a pioneer in the Bitcoin mining industry. The idea was to have a company with the resources to solve these equations and earn Bitcoin as a result.
However, at the time, people didn’t know much about Bitcoin mining. Valery struggled to raise funding for his company, funding that he really needed to sustain the technology required for it to work.
In fact, he had to use the Bitcoin he earned from mining as a way to fund the company, often selling these Bitcoins for as low as $30! Nevertheless, he persisted, and his company eventually became a success.
Since its founding, according to Forbes, BitFury has managed to generate around 800,000 Bitcoins through mining! That is a lot!
BitFury eventually started doing other things too. For example, it sells the BlockBox, a digital mining product that allows people to mine Bitcoin – it’s expensive, though, costing around a million dollars.
Valery didn’t come from wealth, either. In fact, he grew up in Latvia in the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union really hit him hard.
That goes to show that even if you have humble beginnings, you can still make it big if you persist.
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6. Kane Ellis
Photo via Kane Ellis, LinkedIn
Kane Ellis is the co-founder of CarSwap, an Australian company that helps people sell and buy cars.
However, what many people don’t know is that he made a fortune from Bitcoin mining. He got into the game early, using his computer to mine Bitcoin.
At the time, the price of Bitcoin was pretty low – less than $2. So, he was able to earn more Bitcoin from mining than is possible today – there was also a lot less competition, as not many people were mining Bitcoin.
He was making a few Bitcoin a day, which was actually just a few dollars at the time. Less than $10 a day doesn’t seem like much, and most people would have figured that the entire thing was a waste of time, but Kane didn’t.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska, Pexels
He was an 18-year-old high school dropout working in IT. he had always been interested in math, technology, IT, and related fields, so he naturally gravitated toward crypto.
He once sold a few Bitcoins for a McDonald’s meal! While that cost him around $150,000 in the long run, the good news is that he kept most of the Bitcoin he made.
Kane sold a few Bitcoins that he bought at around $1.60 to buy a Maserati years later.
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7. Rachel Siegel
Photo via Rachel Siegel, aka @CryptoFinally, Instagram
Rachel Siegel was a humble substitute teacher in New York City, earning a meager living and living in a dark apartment with windows that faced brick walls. Nowadays, she owns a condo in the Caribbean, and her wealth is due to her smart investments in Bitcoin.
Her journey started when a friend introduced her to a cryptocurrency conference. She was swept by the passion of the people there, who all loved crypto and recognized the potential it had.
She didn’t have much money at the time. However, she decided to invest whatever she could in crypto, which was often just around $25 a week.
$100 a month is not really a lot, and a lot of people could afford to invest that much if only they wanted to. Most likely, you are spending quite a bit of money on things you don’t need.
For example, if you are spending $4 a day on coffee, you are already spending over $100 a month on coffee. In reality, you could just make coffee at home and save all that money to invest in crypto.
Therefore, it’s all about priorities, really. Perhaps you could take the bus or train instead of taking an Uber. Sure, it might cost you a bit of extra time and effort, but it’s a way to save money.
My point is that a lot of people have ways to save money. Not everyone does – I acknowledge that – but I recommend looking into your own finances to see if there is any possible way you may be able to save money.
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She started in 2017. Her story shows that consistency is key.
What is important is not always how much you can invest at once, but how steady and consistent you can be with your investments.
We have seen that Bitcoin is probably here to stay.
Nobody knows the future of crypto, but Bitcoin has been around since 2008! That is well over a decade and a half, so it is certainly not some fad that will be going away tomorrow.
Therefore, if you can afford to be consistent and dedicated and invest a little every day, week, or month, you have the potential to make some good money with Bitcoin.
Now, Rachel has over a million in crypto and possibly a few million, although she didn’t want to reveal the exact amount, according to the New York Post.
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8. Daniel Crocker
Not everyone who has a Bitcoin success story is necessarily a millionaire. The people who become super-rich are obviously outliers, but many other people have had success with Bitcoin in smaller ways that are no less admirable.
A good example is Daniel Crocker, who was featured in a BBC article about people who had luck with Bitcoin.
In 2012, he was doing an apprenticeship at an IT company.
Of course, he wasn’t making that much money, and so he and some coworkers were sitting together during a lunch break and racking their brains on ways to make some additional income.
Well, Bitcoin came up in the discussion. It was still in its infancy, but the group decided to dabble in it.
The venture only lasted a few weeks, but Daniel Crocker kept the Bitcoins he purchased at the time. Years later, it came in handy when he wanted to buy a house.
Buying a house these days is not easy, but Crocker was able to do it by trading his Bitcoins, which covered half the deposit he needed to pay on the house.
9. Javed Khan
Javed Khan was also featured in the BBC article I just mentioned. He entered a lot later in 2018, and he actually didn’t even intend to make money with Bitcoin at first.
He just enjoyed Bitcoin because it allowed peer-to-peer payments without worrying about funds being cleared by the bank and all that. After all, that is what Bitcoin was intended to be – a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system which anyone could use without any central authority having a claim over the process.
However, what he noticed was that after transferring money, he would have some Bitcoin left over in his wallet, and the prices would go up. This happened in 2018, and that is when he realized he could actually invest in it as well.
Eventually, he was able to cash out his profits and move to Dubai, buying a Bentley there.
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Conclusion
There are many other success stories, and listing them all is beyond the scope of this article.
Your definition of success may vary. For some people, it’s earning a seven-figure profit; for others, it’s earning a few hundred dollars a week or month, which is enough to help pay the bills.
At the end of the day, Bitcoin is here to stay, and by investing whatever you can, you have a chance to hop on the Bitcoin success train as well.
