Bitcoin Millionaires Are Coming For Streetwear
19-year-old Erik Finman is about to be the subject of a new CNBC documentary chronicling the lives of Bitcoin millionaires. This, he tells me, is what viewers can expect to see: “I wake up and I’m just in my blanket made of hundred [dollar bills] and I get up and they fall off my face and I jump into my Yeezys as soon as I get off the bed and brush my teeth with a Supreme toothbrush. It’s just a day in the life, so if it so happens to be flexing in that day in the life, then what a coincidence,” he says with an immense amount of swagger. Finman says he’s only kidding about blanketing himself in hundred dollar bills (not that he hasn’t done it—that’s, like, first day millionaire stuff) and the ‘Preme toothbrush (not that one hasn’t come out of the brand’s mad science lab of accessories), but it wouldn’t be too far removed from reality. As Bitcoin booms, cryptocurrency and streetwear are intersecting in horrifying, hilarious, and circular ways: kids are learning how to invest by picking up streetwear, buying into crypto, accumulating riches, blowing said riches to flex in rare streetwear, and going on spending sprees. And in the process, they’re encouraging more retailers to accept the currency. Finman says he started investing in Bitcoin—the emerging currency that seems to be minting a new millionaire every day—when he was 12, and claims he had enough to sell off $100,000 worth of it by the time he was 15. A few years after that, at 17, he got into streetwear. (Some time after the release of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, is where he places it.) In the roughly 18 months since then, Finman’s stockpiled streetwear at the rate of an A-list rapper. “Probably too much to say,” he says when I ask him to estimate the value of his collection. “I don’t want to, I’d feel awful. Definitely the tens of thousands of dollars.” He bought the Kanye-designed Yeezy 750s first, before snapping up Adidas Stan Smiths, Yeezy 350s, and some “silly Bape stuff,” he says, before inevitably spiraling into Supreme. He stopped himself short of buying the Louis Vuitton and Supreme collaborative bags. “It’s not out of my price range—that’s not the problem,” he says. “It’s more like, it’s become an addiction—this is what alcohol is to some people.” Prices don’t seem to worry Finman. “I think I’m going to get the Red Octobers. I’ve been super busy. I’ve been doing a lot of crypto stuff recently but I do need to get back into it,” he says. “They’re outrageously expensive. But,” he laughs, “I feel like, why not? If you can, why not splurge a little?” Read more at GQ.
