LUGANO – Pokemon in exchange for bitcoins and the dream of the redemption of a very young Kurdish-Iraqi refugee is realized in Switzerland, today a multimillionaire thanks to cryptocurrency and an ingenuity worthy of the best talents in Silicon Valley. It is the story, bordering on the unbelievable, of Dadvan Yousuf, now 21, who fled at the age of 3 with his parents from his country, while the second Gulf War was raging. After a trip from Kurdistan, partly by car, partly by ship, then on foot and by other makeshift means, the members of the Yousuf family finally land in Switzerland, where they obtain the status of refugees. In the Confederation they settle near Bienne, in the Canton of Bern, a working-class city with a strong presence of immigrants.
“We were poor, we could never allow ourselves a day off, I would have wanted so much a pair of sneakers but I had to be content with looking at those of others”, confides the young man to the reporter of the weekly Morning Sunday, the Swiss weekly that met him in a room of the Dolder, a 5-star hotel in Zurich that the young man frequents with the ease and assiduity of a consummate businessman. The fact is that, at the age of 11, Dadvan, instead of buying his bike, like many of his peers, gives up his Pokemon collection, sells it and, in exchange, asks his father to buy him 10 units of Bitcoin, at the cost 15 euros each.
“We sent money to Kurdistan, to relatives who remained there, and I was amazed by the slowness of the money transfer. So I discovered Bitcoins, which could be credited instantly and free of charge, ”he explains. “My father called me crazy, but I showed him, in a short time, that I was right, since the first Bitcoins I bought, selling Pokemon, are now worth 600 thousand euros”. Since then, Dadvan Yousuf’s rise has never stopped. “He has already amassed so many millions that he no longer needs to work,” the newspaper wrote Daily indicator of Zurich. He adds that, unlike the talents of Silicon Valley, the very young wizard of Bitcoin is more at ease in places like the Dolder hotel, rather than in the basements and garages, dear to the iconography of the various Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.
“He is always very elegant and cares a lot about his hairstyle,” adds the newspaper. Today the boy who fled as a child from Iraqi Kurdistan has his own company in Zug, the canton where many companies are domiciled for the lucrative tax rates it offers. “In Zug, we have developed a computer program that can predict the volatility of currencies,” says Dadvan Yousuf proudly. Who, at just 21, with a scrappy bank account, is thinking about his future. That’s why he enrolled in an apprenticeship course in the real estate sector. Do you want to put the volatility of cryptocurrencies, in front of the solidity of the brick?
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