Didi Taihuttu has made headlines all over the world. Photo / 123rf
Didi Taihuttu has made headlines all over the world. Photo / 123rf
A Dutch father of three who sold all of his family's worldly possessions to invest in bitcoin says the inspiration partly came on a trip through Asia and Australia.
Didi Taihuttu, who made headlines around the world after selling his 300,000 euro ($NZ504,000) house, in part for bitcoin, now lives with his family in a tiny cabin on a campsite near the city of Venlo in the southeastern Netherlands.
The 39-year-old said everything else was for sale, including the car, motorbike and electric bikes, and even the children's toys, clothing and shoes, news.com.au reports.
With the proceeds, he buys up bitcoin and other crytpocurrencies such as Ethereum and Dogecoin - and waits.
"People will say, 'You're crazy'," Taihuttu told Business Insider Netherlands.
"But we are an adventurous family and are going to gamble for a moment to live minimalist lives. If you never take a risk, life is boring."
Taihuttu said he and his wife made the decision to sell everything while on a nine-month world holiday which the family took after his father died early last year of cancer.
"I had had it. I sold my business and we decided as a family to go travelling."
During the trip, he told Business Insider, he kept meeting people who were using digital currencies, including a South African trader in Bali and a bitcoin trader from Dubai on a beach near Noosa.
"The internet was a revolution for information," he said. "I think that blockchain and cryptocurrency are revolutionising the monetary system. In five years' time, everyone will say, 'We could have seen it coming.' I am responding to this change now."
Taihuttu said the new lifestyle took some time to get used to, swapping their luxury four-bedroom house for a tiny cabin, where his three daughters share bunk beds.
He said teaching the family to live with fewer possessions was "ultimately the decisive factor for my wife to say yes to this plan".
"Education is the best for the kids," he said. "If you raise your kids to be too materialistic, it is not good. And that was what we were doing, to be honest."
In an interview with Motherboard Germany, he said he didn't miss anything - and neither did the kids.
"When we sell their toys and they see how happy other children are as a result, well, they think that's great," he said.
"Material things don't make people happy - they're just distractions."
It's easy to see where Taihuttu is coming from - but did he get in too late? When the first price for bitcoin appeared on October 5, 2009, one US dollar was worth 1309.3 bitcoin.
"Yes, if you had bought $US100 worth of bitcoin in those days, and not sold them in some panic, you would be a half-billionaire today," writes Jeffrey Tucker from the Foundation for Economic Education.
Earlier this month, the digital currency topped $US7000 (NZ$10,000) for the first time ever, after a more than seven-fold increase in value since the start of the year.
In the seven weeks leading up to the $US7000 milestone, it more than doubled its value, Reuters reported.
Bitcoin's market capitalisation - the price multiplied by the number of bitcoins in circulation - now sits at nearly $US121 billion (NZ$174 billion), according to industry website Coinmarketcap, which says the aggregate value of all cryptocurrencies is now over $US208 billion ($NZ299 billion).
But bitcoin, as with other digital currencies, is notoriously volatile and has experienced sharp drops in value in the past. Taihuttu said he wasn't worried about a crash.
"Even if we lose everything, that's not really what it's about," he told Motherboard. "As long as we have each other, everything will be fine. And if necessary, I'll find myself a job and start from scratch.
So should you, too, take the plunge and go all in on bitcoin?
Writing in the Herald Sun, Barefoot Investor Scott Pape likened crypotcurrencies to gambling, not investing, noting that Australia is the most lucrative gambling market in the world.
"And that's why there are plenty of stock-jockeys trying to get you to 'invest'," he writes, calling out headlines from investment newsletters such as "$642,245 for every $10,000 invested?", "This could turn $500 into $42k" and "A potential 629 per cent gain if you buy on tomorrow's opening".
"Fair dinkum, these claims would make Tom Waterhouse blush," Pape writes. "Don't get me wrong - at this time of the year I love a day at the races.
"But at the racetrack, everyone knows it's a punt. Bottom line? Don't confuse cryptocurrencies with investing - they, too, are just a punt."
