How the Bitcoin boom led to ‘a giant fleecing of ordinary people’ | The Sunday Times Magazine

The reality finally hit Fynn Weisgerber, 17, when he was driving home from football practice in May. He pulled over and cried.

“I was having a mental breakdown,” he recalls. “I had just watched $1 million disappear before my eyes in, like, hours. It was crazy how fast it happened.”

Weisgerber is a polite, articulate teenager from Michigan. The words “Jeez” and “oh man” bubble up regularly as he unspools an incredible story that captures what is sure to go down as one of the great manias of financial history: the cryptocurrency boom.

For a few unbelievable months, you see, Weisgerber was a crypto millionaire. He took $2,000 from his savings last year — with his parents’ consent — and, in between Zoom classes during