Winklevoss twins become bitcoin billionaires

The two entrepreneurs famously knows for suing Mark Zuckerberg for stoling their social network idea Facebook. After Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss won $65 million from the Facebook lawsuit, back in 2013 they have invested $11 million in bitcoin when it was traded for $120 per coin.

Bitcoin is a digital curreny, crypto-currency, which doesn’t require centralized organization like the traditional payment systems, such as PayPal. It was invented in 2007 and started as a hobby project for computer geeks. On May 22, 2010 a developer bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 then-little-known bitcoins, at the current rate it’s over $100 million. In the bitcoin community this is date is annually celebrated. By today bitcoin price has surged from a few cents to over $11,000.

“People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.”, Cameron said in 2013. The twins once claimed that they owned 1 percent of all the bitcoins, which is 210,000 bitcoins, at the current rate just over $2 billion. “We see bitcoin as potentially the greatest social network of all,” Tyler Winklevoss told the Financial Times in 2016.

Bitcoin’s insane rise is showing signs of a bubble, last week the price dropped 10% in over 10 minutes. This week the bitcoin price raised to new highs.

The Winklewoss twins’ bitcoin holding might seem enormous; Satoshi Nakamoto the shadowy bitcoin mastermind is estimated to have 1 million bitcoins. After inventing and publishing the white paper about bitcoin, Nakamoto retreated from public life. People aren’t even sure that he’s a real person or a group used this name to publish the ideas. If ‘he’ were to start selling even small part of his bitcoin fortune, it would dramatically drive down the demand for bitcoin as well as the value of it.