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Winklevoss brothers get $1 billion from Bitcoin

03 December 2017 21:00, UTC

Remember the court case when the Winklevoss brothers sued none other than Mark Zuckerberg for intellectual property right violations? This happened in 2004, and four years after the debates, the brothers received $68 million dollars of compensation from Mr Zuckerberg, an event he probably does not want to talk about extensively.

A part of this compensation, eleven million dollars, was used by the Winklevoss brothers to invest in cryptocurrency. Since then, this sum was growing more and more, recently surpassing 1 billion dollars, which probably makes it the greatest outside investment by far. Satoshi Nakamoto, still anonymous after all these years, has a comparable sum of Bitcoins as well, but he wasn’t a fully traditional market player.

The brothers remain Bitcoin billionaires as long as the price of Bitcoin remains $11,000 per coin, however, and the recent drops to 10,000 have briefly revoked their status. Anyway, they have managed to enter the cryptocurrency market at its start and now reap the benefits of their farsightedness.

The story of how Winklevoss brothers and Mark Zuckerberg studied together in Harvard on who stole the idea of whom is described in the popular film called The Social Network. Zuckerberg himself stated the film is unrealistic, but the public reception was welcoming, with 7/10 on IMDb.