BITCOIN SUCCESS STORIES, MILLIONAIRES AND BIGGEST BITCOIN WALLETS
Bitcoin’s rapidly increasing price has left a wake of very rich individuals, most of whom bought in early with a solid belief that the new system would be a success.
If you bought 4 BTC the beginning of 2016 when the price was only £300, you would have cost you £1200. Today the going rate for a Bitcoin is around £2000 meaning your 4 BTC would now be worth £8000. So that’s a £6800 profit in just 18 months! Impressive for such a small investment.
Some people however bought in even earlier than that and have substantially biiger profits.
In January 2011, the Bitcoin price was just 20 pence, meaning if you’d have invested £1000 back then, you’d have got 5000 Bitcoin, which at today’s price would be worth £10 Million!
Some of the early day miners and optimistic investors did buy in at this price and are now living the dream so to speak, at least when it comes to their Bitcoin wallet balance!
Very impressive even if you bought recently, but there are hoards of people who did get in early and did make a lot of money!
The 10,000 BTC Pizza
Perhaps the most famous story is the Bitcoin Pizza story. This was the first ever real world purchase using Bitcoin, where a Florida developer bought 2 peperoni pizzas for 10,000 BTC! Now worth £20 Million, that is one hell of an expensive pizza. At the time the transaction was only worth around $20, but I bet that guy is kicking himself now! This has now gave birth to Bitcoin pizza day, where Bitcoin fans around the world celebrate by buying pizza on the anniversary this transaction happened.
15 Year old early investor makes $100,000 to fund startup
In 2012, a 15 year old used a $1000 gift from his grandmother to invest into the then speculative digital currency. He sold his investment a year and a half later for $100,000 and used his earnings to fund a startup education resource called Botangle, paying his employees of course in Bitcoin. He now holds 403 BTC which is now worth in USD $1.09 Million. The young millionaire did a Ted Talk about his story and shares his personal views on the currency which you can watch here. Check out his startup here.
The FBI seize 144,000 Bitcoin from the Dark Net Silk Road Marketplace!
Worth at today’s price £288 Million, the FBI hit the jackpot when they took down the infamous Silk Road marketplace and seized all the Bitcoin held in their online wallets. This was in October 2013, and nobody knows where these Bitcoin are now stored, if at all.
Richest wallets
Because Bitcoin is open source, all wallet addresses can be viewed and their balances publically available which makes for interesting reading,
The largest Bitcoin wallet to date holds 124,178 BTC, worth at todays price £248 Million! The users identity is not known, but whomever does is certainly a ‘hodler’ because they’ve only made one outgoing transaction since the wallet was created in 2016. This wallet alone holds 0.7459% of all Bitcoin in existence.
Next in the list is a wallet which holds 113,891 BTC, worth £227 Million.
Number 3 hold 107,844 BTC worth £215 Million
Number 4 holds 80,145 BTC worth £160 Million
Number 5 holds 79,957 BTC worth £159 Million
The top 100 largest wallets can be found here
There are many accounts of users holding large amounts of Bitcoin on wallets back in it’s infancy, and without thinking how big it would become, throwing their old hard drives away. Now the price has boomed, they are frantically looking for them, even as far as one guy from Wales in the UK renting a digger to go through the landfill in an attempt to find the old hard drive. Apparently this one man held 7500 Bitcoin, which today is worth £15 Million!
So Bitcoin can undoubtedly make fortunes, and there are for sure many more unpublished accounts of people who have made massive profits. In the future, there are many varying estimates for what the price could reach, some in the Millions. If Bitcoin does go mainstream, the price will undoubtedly rise to great heights, and even investors now could become Millionaires.