These 19 billionaires have made their riches in the world of cryptocurrency. t's been a wild twelve months for the world of cryptocurrencies, from the Elon Musk-fueled ascent of Dogecoin, to Web3 innovations and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to the wild swings in Bitcoin and other crypto tokens.
Last year Forbes identified 19 crypto billionaires, the most ever, who were worth a collective $140 billion. Now, those same individuals are worth less than $30 billion, as of March 10, 2023, the date Forbes measured net worths for its list. Ten of them are no longer billionaires.
The creator of Bitcoin under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto is thought to be the largest Bitcoin holder. The Winklevoss twins, institutional investors like MicroStrategy, and governments like the United States and China are just a few examples of other well-known Bitcoin millionaires.
The co-founder of Tesla Inc. revealed on Twitter that he owns only a tiny fraction of one bitcoin token. "I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from . 25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," Musk confessed.
Tesla Inc. said it has sold 75% of the bitcoin it had purchased, little more than a year after investing in the digital currency. The electric-vehicle maker said the sale added $936 million to its balance sheet in the second quarter.
Due to uncertainty about when the lockdown would lift in Shanghai, Musk said Tesla unloaded 75% of its bitcoin holdings to maximize its cash position.
The four crypto billionaire deaths within a month gave fuel to several conspiracy theories among the crypto community. One user associated the string of deaths with a mafia-style hit job and said that the “crypto world is taking a page from the mafia handbook.”
Nearly 4 million bitcoin are estimated to be lost forever. Each lost bitcoin increases the value of remaining bitcoin in the network. Many private keys held in self-storage are often accidentally discarded or overwritten by other files.
Given that the price of Bitcoin has dropped to less than one-third of its maximum value, it is safe to assume that at least 100,000 people were millionaires prior to the 2021 bear market. According to a Decrypt story from March 2020, there were, in fact, close to 95,000 Bitcoin millionaires at the time.
Largest individual Bitcoin holdings
Data shows there are five Bitcoin addresses with between 100,000 and 1 million BTC in them. Four of these have been identified and belong to exchanges.
Of course, Finman is biased: The teen crypto phenom used $1,000 his grandmother gave him when he was 12 years old to buy his first bitcoin when the little-known virtual currency was just $12 a token. By age 18, Finman had become a millionaire. (See more: Who is Erik Finman, the Bitcoin Millionaire Teenager?)
So… how to get rich? You can absolutely make money through crypto, just as you would trading any other type of asset. But with the extra volatility, there is a higher risk and higher potential profits.
But however Bitcoin evolves, no new bitcoins will be released after the 21-million coin limit is reached. Reaching this supply limit is likely to have the most significant impact on Bitcoin miners, but it's possible that Bitcoin investors could also experience adverse effects.
Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ) was the crypto billionaire who lost the most money following the crypto crisis of 2022, with a net worth drop amounting to 82 billion U.S. dollars.
Bitcoin will never disappear! The network is here and as long as miners use it, Bitcoin cannot disappear. If all miners would stop using the network, then Bitcoin could disappear. In all likelihood, however, this will never happen.
Bitcoin Price Prediction 2050
By the year 2050, Bitcoin's average price could reach approximately $646,200. The minimum value of a Bitcoin during this period is estimated to be around $609,315. These figures indicate the potential for substantial growth over the long term.
In 2040, we can expect an average price of Ethereum (ETH) around $23,000 – $25,000, depending on market trends. More positive forecasts predict Ether's coin to be around $40,000.
Satoshi Nakamoto (born 5 April 1975) is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database.
Tesla made a $140m (£113.5m) loss on its Bitcoin investments in 2022, according to filings. The electric car maker told the US regulator it lost $204m on Bitcoin overall, though it gained back $64m through trading.
Tesla announced in Feb. 2021 it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, a move that caused the price of bitcoin to surge.
Bitcoin soared to delirious highs in 2021
Tesla directly benefited, as it locked in more than $100 million in profits from its crypto investment.
Elon Musk apparently isn't trying to hodl Tesla's bitcoin during a crypto winter. During the company's Q2 earnings report, the electric car company revealed it has sold 75% of its bitcoin holdings this quarter. The company sold the coins for $963 million.