Swedish veteran computer programmer Alexander Bottema has become a millionaire after investing his life savings in Bitcoin in 2013.
Swedish computer programmer Alexander Bottema has multiplied his life savings over one hundred fold in the last four years. He first invested in Bitcoin in 2013, when the digital currency was priced at only $30. Bottema realized that Bitcoin had huge potential and sold all his stocks and liquidated his savings in order to purchase as much of the digital currency as possible.
Bottema has not sold any of his holdings, even as the price of Bitcoin has flirted with $4500 in recent days. In an interview with Business Insider, the Bitcoin investor says:
”I consider it a retirement insurance. I’m not thinking about buying any more, since I can never get the same return on investment again. I could consider selling some of my assets should the price hit 100,000 dollars.”
Brief profile of Alexander Bottema
Bottema was raised in a small community near Stockholm in Sweden and learned to program on his family’s Apple II computer. He studied computer science at Uppsala University in 1991 and went on to earn his PhD.
He returned in Stockholm where he began working in data security and encryption for consultancy Upec Industriteknik. When his employer was bought out, Bottema and his two colleagues established their own company called Polytrust. Today, Bottema is living in the US and working at Massachusetts-based Mathworks, a provider of data analysis and simulation for industrial applications.
How Bottema discovered Bitcoin
According to Bottema, he encountered Bitcoin for the first time in 2010. At first he wasn’t interested in the digital currency, believing it to be infeasible. However, he changed his mind after the price of Bitcoin crashed and eventually rebounded. Bottema says:
”I rejected it as something uninteresting. Seeing that I had a long track record in data security, I was certain that it wouldn’t be possible to build safe servers that are open, and envisioned a crash. The following year, I was sitting on the subway and read in the Metro newspaper how Bitcoin had recovered after a crash. I couldn’t understand how a currency that is built on trust could recover. That piqued my interest.”
Bottema is just one of the many so-called “Bitcoinnaires” who now have a high net worth due to their early investment in Bitcoin.
