Two brothers bet on an unknown cryptocurrency and now they are millionaires

Two brothers became millionaires by investing in a virtual currency different from bitcoins and related to the dogecoin that Elon Musk likes.

This is a story that lasts more or less 12 hours. And that has as protagonists two unemployed brothers from Westchester, United States, who became billionaires overnight thanks to an investment in cryptocurrency.

With a few more details, the background could be backdated to February this year, when the investments of the two improvised brokers (38 and 42 years old) began. Which wouldn't change the underlying moral, which is that we live in exceptional times, in which some lucky, lucky few (it's important to point out), can take surprisingly shortcuts to accumulate enormous wealth.

How did the brothers from upstate New York get rich with a cryptocurrency

The story was brought to light by CNN. They interviewed James and Tommy, two photographers from the state of New York who found themselves in financial difficulty after Covid crippled their main business: that of video at weddings.

A cryptocurrency expert friend advised them to invest a few hundred dollars in the shiba inu coin, a digital currency born as a joke on the internet and related to the dogecoin favored by Elon Musk, themselves a strange semi-serious magic of some unknown techno wizard of the internet.

Exactly the DOGE has increased its value by 11,000% since January this year, dragging up the quotations of the parallel cryptocurrency, in which not only Tommy and James (whose surnames have been omitted for reasons of confidentiality), but also their family had invested, for a total of $8,000. That became one million in a few hours in mid-April and nine million a month later.

How much is really worth investing in cryptocurrency

Now that money is all in the pockets of the brothers, who have cashed.

Becoming rich with cryptocurrencies, however, is not as easy as this story would suggest. There are more than a thousand virtual currencies (even Facebook's), which mainly present risks due to their volatility. The quotations, in fact, rise and fall very quickly.

In addition, investing in bitcoin and the like presents a number of very peculiar dangers: for example, you are exposed to hacker attacks and can happen to lose your password or lose a file, events that would leave the investor cut off forever from your fund.

Giuseppe Giordano