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The twin brothers who sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming he stole the idea for Facebook are worth more than $1bn after capitalising on the astonishing rise in Bitcoin.
An $11m (£8m) bet on Bitcoin made by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss over four years ago has multiplied by almost 10,000% after Bitcoin reached a new record breaking high in december 2017.This is believed to be the first billion-dollar return made by a cryptocurrency investor, a landmark moment for the twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg and claimed that Facebook's idea was originally theirs.
In 2009, the Winklevoss twins received a settlement from Facebook valued at more than $65 million.According to the Telegraph, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss bought 1 percent of all currently mined bitcoin for a price of $11 million in 2013 with the lawsuit money received from Facebook. Since then, the $11 million crypto-bet has multiplied by almost 10,000 percent, making the twins the first bitcoin billionaires.
Seven years ago, the value of a single bitcoin was worth a quarter-of-a-cent. Today, that single bitcoin is worth upwards of $2,200.The twins used part of their settlement money to invest heavily in bitcoin.Bitcoin has grown exponentially since then: According to Fortune when the Winklevosses first invested, the cryptocurrency was trading at $120 per coin, a far jump from the more than $11,000 it has reached today. That's an increase of over 9,000 percent.
In October 2015, the brothers launched Gemini, a bitcoin exchange described by the Financial Times as “one of the first regulated and licensed digital currency exchanges in the developed world.
Interestingly the first bitcoin transaction was made by a software programmer on “Bitcoin Talk” known as Lazlo Hanyecz who offered to 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas. For the first three days, no one took him on his offer with Hanyecz writing: “So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I’m offering too low?”
A user eventually paid about $25 for two pizzas. In today’s bitcoins, those pizzas would have cost cost Hanyecz $22 million.