Yahoo Finance Bitcoin's plunge turns Winklevoss twins into ex-billionaires
Earlier this week, the price of Bitcoin dropped below $10,000 (£7,225), cutting its value in half since its peak in December.
While it has since bounced back to over $10,000, the dramatic fall in its value over the past month has reduced the fortunes of many Bitcoin holders worldwide, including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin brothers who bought $11m worth of Bitcoin four years ago which subsequently rose to $1bn.
The American entrepreneurs, who sued Mark Zuckerberg in 2008 claiming he stole the idea for Facebook, used a portion of their $65m payout to buy roughly 1pc (around 120,000 coins) of the world’s supply of Bitcoin in March 2013, when one coin was worth around $120.
The value of these coins ballooned by almost 10,000pc between March 2013 and December 2017, making the twins some of the first publicly-known Bitcoin billionaires.
The digital currency's volatility, however, has since hit the pair hard. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the twins have seen their fortunes drop 37pc in the past month, as a result of the tumbling value of the cryptocurrency.
Each brother had around $443m sliced from their net worth, leaving them with $739m apiece.
The 37-year-old Winklevoss brothers are unlikely to be too concerned though, as they intend to hold the currency over the long-term. “We’ve never sold a Bitcoin, we’re in it for the long haul,” Cameron Winklevoss said two years ago.
Last month, Tyler Winklevoss told the New York Times: “We still think it is probably one of the best investments in the world and will be for decades to come. And if it’s not, we’d rather live with disappointment than regret.”
He has said the total value of the currency could be trillions and told The Telegraph last year that bitcoin was “like a better version of gold”.
According to the NYT, the pair have collected an additional $350m in other virtual currencies, including Ethereum, but this, too, has fallen in value this week, by around $300 per Ether.
