Bitcoin winner: Hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson no longer needs to work after the investing £40,000 in Bitcoin over seven years

It’s Christmas 2017 and hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson is snuggled up with her husband on the sofa watching the TV news in their council house outside Birmingham

It’s Christmas 2017 and hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson is snuggled up with her husband on the sofa watching the TV news in their council house outside Birmingham, when an item about Bitcoin catches her attention.

A property is for sale in London for 3,000 Bitcoin – the equivalent of £17 million – with the owner so confident in the future of the cryptocurrency he is refusing cash. ‘I wouldn’t mind some of that,’ she nudges Neal, a gas engineer.

Little could Jacqui have known that when she Googled Bitcoin that night it would change her life. Within five years she would no longer need to work thanks to her success with cryptocurrency.

It’s doubtful, too, that Jacqui could have predicted she would have also corralled more than ten of her family and friends into buying Bitcoin.

And when she reveals that her own 82-year-old mother’s initial investment has shot up from £12,000 to £57,000 in two years, you can see why Jacqui’s eyes light up when I arrive at the avid Daily Mail reader’s home to learn the secrets of her success.

‘I want to tell people about my own positive experience with Bitcoin,’ says the 57-year-old grandmother, who with her thick glossy hair is more Bitcoin Babe than Crypto Gran.

‘Bitcoin is not just for the super-rich to make even more money,’ she says. ‘It can be for people like me, people who left school at 16 with no qualifications.’

Crypto winner: Hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson no longer needs to work after the investing £40,000 in Bitcoin over seven years

Bitcoin was the world’s first cryptocurrency when it launched in 2009. Hundreds more digital currencies have followed but Bitcoin remains the most popular.

Jacqui is among the 12 per cent of UK adults who now own cryptocurrencies. City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warns that crypto remains largely unregulated in the UK, is high risk and that owners should be prepared to lose all their money.

It is highly volatile: for example, in the year to November 2022 the value dropped by close to 75 per cent. Nonetheless, interest in cryptocurrencies is rising as prices hit new record highs.

Bitcoin is up by more than 150 per cent in the last year alone and this week breached $106,000 – largely thanks to the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House.

Were Jacqui to crystallise her current holding today she’d be looking at £250,000 from an overall investment of £40,000 over just seven years.

Might it not be prudent to cash in while she’s ahead?

Jacqui shakes her head: ‘I think in decades – this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a long-term investment.’

When pressed on her motivation, as to whether she gets a kick out of the risk of investing in a decentralised, unregulated currency that essentially exists only on computers or a thrill out of watching the peaks and troughs, she shakes her head again. ‘I do it because we never had anything growing up. And I never wanted to be poor.

‘My friends say, why don’t you spend the money on a holiday? But we take our caravan with our family ten miles up the road every year – we live frugally. I see Bitcoin as hope for ordinary people who have no chance otherwise of making any money.

‘Bitcoin has given me time, the scarcest commodity of all. My husband pays the bills and now we have enough money that I don’t need to work which has given me the freedom to pick up my two granddaughters from school, take them swimming, cook for them, and be there for them in these precious years.’

Self-deprecating and softly spoken, Jacqui says dyslexia left her barely able to read.

Born one of four siblings in a Catholic family with a coal-miner father and a factory worker mother, Jacqui was told that life on the production line was her only future.

‘On my first day in the factory I was gluing cupboards to make kitchen cabinets. I asked the woman next to me how long she’d been there and she told me 27 years. I went home that night and cried to Mum that I didn’t think I could do that job. She said, “Tough, that’s just the way it is” .’

At 19, Jacqui could be found living in a bed and breakfast in Wolverhampton with a baby, her relationship with her childhood sweetheart over.

‘I remember bouncing my son on the bed and saying, “Right kid – it’s just you and me. Let’s do something.”’