"A very difficult life journey, but what is the end?
After running a small online business, Forbes magazine cover designer Charlie Shrem became a Bitcoin (BTC) cryptocurrency millionaire but was later thrown into prison.
Shrem has told the story of how he founded BitInstant and grew it into a multi-million dollar BTC empire before being arrested for his role in the firm.
Shrem's first business which was an e-commerce site only charged $5 for each item such as lamps, toothbrushes and others where the idea belonged to his cousin, however he used his coding skills to create the actual site.
In his spare time, Shrem would hang out on online message boards to learn about BTC and at that time, the only way to buy BTC was to transfer a large amount of funds to Mt.Gox and then deposit took a week.
Back to the founding of BitInstant, Shrem who met someone in one of the forums named “Gareth” started the business together which allowed many people to buy or sell BTC instantly.
To enable instant purchases, BitInstant has deposited money into Mt.Gox and bought BTC with it then sold the digital asset in smaller amounts to its various clients.
However, Shrem and his partner ran into problems when the volume of transactions increased to the point where they needed more cash to deposit into Mt.Gox, but unfortunately the capital was quickly depleted.
Therefore, the two entrepreneurs who met Roger Ver who helped them through a capital injection of $100,000 then Ver suggested his team to hire Erik Voorhees.
Voorhees and Shrem ran into David Azar who had invested a significant amount of money in the firm and during his honeymoon, Azar met Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to convince them to invest in BitInstant.
BitInstant grew so fast, but Shrem who fell in love with a non-Jew struggled in his relationship and eventually decided to leave the Jewish community after being very upset with his family.
However, while trying to get off the plane in New York, Shrem was arrested and charged with money laundering after several BitInstant customers were accused of using the BTC they bought for illegal purposes including criminal transactions on the Silk Road dark web market.
When released on bail, Shrem was placed under house arrest and forced to live with his parents. Later in 2017, he joined Jaxx and served as chief operating officer having founded CryptoIQ.
