The 8 Biggest Bitcoin Players Who Could Make a Fortune Off the Cryptocurrency
There are plenty of well-known critics of Bitcoin in the banking and business worlds. Recently, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., called the cryptocurrency a “fraud” and said it would blow up. He even went so far as to say he would fire anyone who traded Bitcoin because “they are stupid.”
But not everyone’s so dismissive. Bitcoin has had a bullish run in 2017 , rising from $966 at the start of the year to a record high of more than $6,000 this month , and some major holders of the currency are no doubt looking to cash in on its value. The names might surprise you. While Bitcoins allows for anonymity, using strings of letters and numbers to identify sources of transactions , certain people have publicly revealed that they’re enthusiastic users. Here are the people with the biggest known stakes in tannotation disambiguated wl-thing” itemid=”http://data.wordlift.io/wl0493/entity/bitcoin”>Bitcoin.
You likely know Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who tried and failed to gain control of Facebook after alleging that it had been appropriated from them , thanks to Armie Hammer’s satirical portrayal of both siblings in The Social Network. But the Winklevii have a second act in their enormous Bitcoin investment. While they were shut out of creating a Bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF), their 2013 investment in $11 million worth of bitcoin”>Bitcoin (which reportedly amounted to one percent of all the currency in circulation) looks pretty rosy now. That same amount is worth approximately 21 times as much now, putting their total at about $231 million.
Silbert, a venture capitalist and founder of Digital Currency Group, was an early proponent of Bitcoin. He reportedly nabbed 48,000 Bitcoins in an auction held by the U.S. Marshals Service in 2014 (the government had seized much of the currency from Silk Road, an online marketplace it said was used for illegal drugs) . Bitcoin was then worth $350, which means Silbert’s haul has climbed about 16 times, from approximately 16.8 million to $268.8 million.
Draper, a venture capitalist worth billions thanks in part to his early investment in Skype, made headlines for his purchase of 30,000 Bitcoins in 2014 from that same government auction . Then worth about $19 million, that stash would be up to $171 million now. Draper is clearly feeling optimistic about the digital currency market, as he’s gone on to back Tezos, a new cryptocurrency.
Shrem is more infamous than famous.
