Much as The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network strove to tell the story of Facebook’s founding—that first year of inception and adoption—Bitcoin Billionaires is an origin story, both of the characters within these pages, and of the cryptocurrency itself. We’ve watched Facebook grow and change over the past decade, and similarly, it will be interesting to see where Bitcoin goes. In my opinion, the story of this new era of cryptocurrencies is just beginning.
One of the greatest strikes against cryptocurrencies has always been their volatility, which the past year has only served to highlight. Since I started writing this book, the price of Bitcoin has declined more than seventy percent; at the same time, the crypto industry has grown by leaps and bounds, with new companies aimed at servicing, profiting from, and building on this novel technology that springs up every day. The blockchain is everywhere, and Bitcoin knows no borders; Bitcoin believers in nearly every country in the world continue to HODL (hold), even as Wall Street struggles to understand where crypto fits within financial structures that seem more antiquated every day.
There is no doubt in my mind: the Bitcoin revolution is real, and cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
As of this moment, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss still remain Bitcoin Billionaires. Together they are the CEO and presidents of Gemini, their crypto exchange, which now has over two hundred employees and is growing by the day. Gemini has been described as the most regulated crypto exchange and custodian in the world, and on its own is thought to be valued at well over a billion dollars. The twins are also early investors in Ether, Zcash, Filecoin, Tezos, and many other cryptocurrencies.
Tyler and Cameron continue to be Bitcoin’s biggest advocates. They believe that though Bitcoin has come a long way since its infancy, there is still a long way to go. If, as they believe, Bitcoin is truly gold 2.0, it is still radically undervalued. Gold is a seven-trillion-dollar market; Bitcoin, currently, is valued at only a fraction of that amount.
Whatever happens next, there is no doubt that the Bitcoin story is far from over. Moreover, the technology behind Bitcoin has only barely begun to infiltrate the financial, technological, and online worlds. The technology that makes Bitcoin work—the blockchain and crypto private keys—has the potential to decentralize not just money but also data in a way that could “give the internet back to the people”—freeing user information from the siloed monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. The irony is that Bitcoin and its hashes may very well do what Facebook so spectacularly failed to do—protect its users’ data from hackers, misuse, and overarching authority, and allow a form of online communication that is entirely and truly free.
Roger Ver has officially given up his U.S. citizenship and currently splits his time between St. Kitts, Japan, and the rest of the world. A huge voice in the crypto world and a controversial figure online (with over half a million followers on Twitter), at the moment Ver is involved in what has essentially been described as a civil war in the Bitcoin community; Ver and a group of like-minded Bitcoiners have broken off to form “Bitcoin Cash,” which takes the cryptocurrency in a different direction in terms of scaling and block size, with a goal of turning it into something that could more easily supplant cash. Ver continues to invest in crypto-related companies and spends much of his time running Bitcoin.com, whose team has recently surpassed a hundred people. Bitcoin.com endeavors to build the tools to allow anyone to interact financially and without government supervision with everyone else in the world.
Erik Voorhees currently resides in Denver, Colorado, and is the CEO and founder of a cryptocurrency exchange company called Shapeshift, which allows customers to exchange one form of cryptocurrency for another instantaneously. Originally, the company did not collect personal data on its users, or hold any of the currencies in its accounts. An article in the Wall Street Journal published September 28, 2018, entitled “How Dirty Money Disappears into the Black Hole of Cryptocurrency,” alleged that as much as $9 million in illegally obtained funds had been “laundered” through Shapeshift, as part of $88.6 million of fraudulent funds moving through a total of forty-six crypto exchanges; Voorhees refuted the report, maintaining that Shapeshift uses “blockchain forensics” to weed out money launderers and that Wall Street Journal’s reporters didn’t understand the data.
After being introduced to Bitcoin by the Winklevoss twins, banking heir Matthew Mellon rapidly became one of cryptocurrencies’ biggest advocates, building a massive fortune first in Bitcoin, then in the cryptocurrency XRP—a digital currency developed by the company Ripple in 2012. On April 16, 2018, at the age of fifty-four, Matthew Mellon passed away suddenly on the way to a drug rehab center in Cancun, Mexico, where he hoped to overcome an opioid dependency. At the time of his death, his crypto fortune was valued at somewhere between five hundred million and a billion dollars.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld his conviction and sentence in May 2017, and the Supreme Court declined to consider any further appeal in June 2018, Ross Ulbricht, now thirty-four, is currently serving a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole for the crimes of money laundering and conspiracy to traffic narcotics by means of the internet. There are many in the Bitcoin and libertarian community—including Roger Ver—who see Ulbricht as a martyr who has been unfairly jailed. Ulbricht will most likely die in prison.
Charlie Shrem served nearly a year at Lewisberg Federal Penitentiary in Union County, Pennsylvania, after which he was transferred to a halfway house in Harrisburg. While at the halfway house, he washed dishes at a local restaurant. He was released on September 16, 2016. Sadly, Charlie has no contact with his family. He remains friends with Erik Voorhees. Since leaving prison, Charlie’s relationship with the Winklevoss twins has remained unsettled. On November 1, 2018, a federal suit was unsealed accusing Charlie of owing the twins five thousand Bitcoin, which they claim he stole from them in 2012. Charlie has denied the charge, his lawyer Brian Klein telling the New York Times that “nothing could be further from the truth.… Charlie plans to vigorously defend himself and quickly clear his name.” The suit is ongoing.
Almost a year to the day after his release from prison, on September 15, 2017, Charlie married Courtney. Together they’ve made a life for themselves in Sarasota, Florida, which includes time spent on Charlie’s boat. The boat is named The Satoshi.