Kelly Robertson
Bitcoin may not be 100 percent anonymous, but it is anonymous enough for us to know how many Bitcoin billionaires are there. It is not like that many people want to brag about it — cause, y’a know, taxes and other problems that could arise the moment someone realizes there’s a billionaire in his/her neighborhood.
The Winklevoss twins, famous for giving Mark Zuckerberg the idea for Facebook, become the first widely accepted Bitcoin Billionaires in early December. At that time, their fortune was estimated at $1.063 billion based on their holdings of 91,666 bitcoins.
They are definitely not the only ones with a bunch of “digital gold” assets, with most other people in that group lurking in the shadow.
Billionaires use more than one wallet
If they were using only one wallet, like Coinbase, it would be relatively easy to identify all of them. However, that’s not the case and there are many good reasons for this. For one thing, we have seen a few exchanges that also provided wallet services going bust, and chances are most crypto billionaires hold their assets in hardware wallets, and perhaps even have “paper copies” of their assets. This, BTW, is a practice we suggest to everyone with a significant cryptocurrency holdings (you can get away without paper, though).
But we still have no idea how many Bitcoin billionaires are there…
200 Bitcoin Billionaires?
We can’t just make a poll and ask everyone “are you a Bitcoin Billionaire?” We can however take a look at this article at Cointelegraph, which mentions an anonymous representative for BitInfoCharts, who told MSN in an email that there may actually be as many as 200 Bitcoin billionaires, and possibly no fewer than 35.
He noted that most Bitcoin addresses with significant holdings are likely held by exchanges and hedge funds, while individuals will hold their assets across a number of addresses. Nevertheless, he was able to identify more than 100 addresses that already have over $100 million worth of bitcoins.
Secrecy is part of the idea…
Bitcoin billionaires are tech-savvy folks, and most of them don’t want to show off their wealth. As noted before, that could signal IRS and similar authorities in other countries where to look for money. Not that they don’t want to pay their share of taxes — nor we suggest anyone to avoid that — it’s just that Bitcoin is super-volatile and taxing it could be both hard and unfair. Like, what’s the tax base for Bitcoin? Its value last month? Last year? The price differences are huge.
Instead, these guys and gals tend to follow Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin creator, and keep their identities hidden from the mainstream media.
However, sooner or later, Bitcoin Billionaires will be prompted to spend a portion of their fortunes and at that time, those publicly known will be the first in the (IRS) firing line. For the time being though, they can enjoy their wealth without third parties even knowing about it.
