A 12-year-old, future unschooling advocate at an Occupy Wall Street protest learns about Bitcoin while running from the cops. He invests. Later, the independent Erik Finman will become the supposed “world’s youngest bitcoin millionaire” at age 18. That’s not where the story ends, though. The high school dropout has since gone on to launch education startups, satellites into space, and become involved with big influencers and ideas in the crypto space, proving once again that independent, natural learning has a whole lot more to offer than his teacher’s advised route of working at McDonald’s, or a “cultish” adherence to BTC maximalism.
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Unschooling: Kind of a Big Deal
With more and more people from all walks of life jumping into the unschooling revolution, Erik Finman’s story is illustrative of a shift in thinking on education. Bitcoiners are no strangers to the freedom first philosophy, either. Whether it means selling everything one has and hitting the road as a family, growing and selling food to become more self-sufficient, or holding 446 bitcoins as a 20-year-old, folks are beginning to see the connection between decentralized money and permissionless learning.
Botangle Aims to Replace Public Schools
In 2015, Finman sold $100,000 of his BTC stash and dropped out of school to work on Botangle, about which the independent learner stated in an interview with Wired:
Its mission is to replace the public school system because of my terrible experiences in it.
Finman has also stated that if “I ever decide to ever have kids I will never send them to school.”
Botangle’s mission was to pair learners with educators online, furthering the already swift current
