Crypto Presidents: Barons holding the largest shares in the Bitcoin Industry

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  • As of July 2022, over 83 million people had created unique Bitcoin wallets on Blockchain.com and 98 million on Coinbase
  • The parent cryptocurrency has been here for 14 years now. It has maintained as the top most decentralized currency in the world
  • If Bitcoin makes it to the mainstream, these individuals stand a great chance of becoming decision-makers in the world

Do you ever imagine a world where cryptocurrency replaces fiat as the mainstream transactional option? If that were ever to happen, the cryptocurrency with the best chance to take up that challenge would be bitcoin. Why?

The parent cryptocurrency has been here for 14 years now. It has maintained as the top most decentralized currency in the world. The bitcoin system has never been hacked. Already two countries have legalized bitcoin, indicating the trust the digital money holds among nations and institutions worldwide. Additionally, as of July 2022, over 83 million people had created unique Bitcoin wallets on Blockchain.com and 98 million on Coinbase.

Over fifty countries are in the early stages of launching Central Bank Digital Currencies. These CBDCs will act as a bridge that will cross many people worldwide to digital currencies. That spells good news for cryptocurrency and bitcoin proponents.

Among the bitcoin evangelists anxiously waiting for bitcoin to become mainstream are those holding the most coins in bitcoin. Here is a list of individuals in line to become the “Crypto Presidents” owing to their bitcoin, otherwise known as Bitcoin Whales.

Read: The scramble among big companies to buy more bitcoin as supply wanes

Who owns the most bitcoin in 2022

One of the most attractive characteristics of bitcoin is its transparency. All bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public ledger; any interested party can tell the addresses that hold the most coins.

Among the challenges in collecting the information is:

  • For most addresses, the owners are not known.
  • Multiple addresses could belong to a single individual; therefore, we cannot accurately tell how many bitcoin individuals have.

However, we will look at the publicly available information. If bitcoin makes it mainstream, the public Bitcoin whales are in a better position to become the “Crypto Presidents”.

Who owns the most bitcoin

Satoshi Nakamoto

The address of the mysterious creator of bitcoin and blockchain holds the most bitcoin, estimated at around 980,000 to 1.1 million BTC. This amounts to about 5 per cent of the total bitcoin in supply. Many other addresses are believed to be his, but only one can trace back to Satoshi as the genesis block to mine bitcoin. The genesis address holds 980,000 BTC.

Cryptocurrency has produced the most mysterious story of the 21st century as the big question remains unanswered, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The fact that Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin is based on the famous whitepaper published in October 2008, exactly 14 years later.

Some people still believe that Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive. Additionally, some people still send bitcoin to the Genesis wallet owned by him/ them.

Roger Ver

According to varied sources, Roger Ver, famously known as Bitcoin Jesus, has amassed over 400,000 BTC. He was among the first adopter of bitcoin and purchased the currency in March 2011 when it was valued under US$1. He integrated BTC payments into Memorydealers.com. This was among the first companies to allow customers to make payments in bitcoin.

His Bitcoin could have probably reduced supply as he was an early investor in several blockchain projects. They include Kraken, Ripple, Blockchain.com, purse.io, Bitpay.com, Shapeshift.io, Safello, and many others.

Roger Ver is still the CEO of Bitcoin.com.

Read: Understanding BTC dominance and price to leverage against the crypto market

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss

The Winklevoss twins came to the limelight when they sued Mark Zuckerberg to have stolen their idea of a social network. Zuckerberg compensated them with US$65 million, which they invested in Bitcoin.

The twins currently hodl over an estimated 70,000 bitcoins. The twins have been quite enthusiastic about promoting bitcoin adoption.

“Unlike the internet, which you could not buy a piece of, you can buy a piece of this new internet of money,” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss said in an interview with CNN.

Tim Draper

Billionaire Tim Draper has openly declared that he owns nearly 30,000 BTC. He bought the digital currency in 2014 from the United States Marshals from the shuttered Silk Road black market for US$632 per coin (US$18.7 million).

In an Interview with Protos, Draper is still very bullish about bitcoin. The Bitcoin Whale owns shares in Hotmail, Tesla, Skype and Theranos. Additionally, he adds that he has never sold any of his Bitcoins but continues to pile them up.

He has a university and a Housing program that accepts Bitcoin as a form of payment.

Garvin Andersen

There is no clear record of how many Bitcoins Garvin Andersen earns, but he is worth noting in this article. In 2010, Garvin gave out 19,700 BTC to individuals for simply solving a captcha. He corresponded with Nakamoto in the early days of Bitcoin and believed in his vision for a P2P electronic cash system.

A man who had a direct conversation with Satoshi Nakamoto and, at some point, claimed to know him must be holding quite some amount of bitcoin.

The are other bitcoin whales that I have not mentioned in this article, such as Chris Larsen, Changpeng Zhao, Brian Armstrong, Sam Bankman- Fried, Michael Saylor, and many others. If Bitcoin makes it to the mainstream, these individuals stand a great chance of becoming decision-makers in the world.

Read: Blockchain: A pathway towards sustainable development in Africa

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