Bitcoin recorded a new high today, hitting $5,991 on the benchmark CoinDesk price index. On major exchanges like Bitfinex and Bitstamp, the price briefly crossed $6,000 intraday.
Bitcoin recorded a new high today, hitting $5,991 on the benchmark CoinDesk price index. On major exchanges like Bitfinex and Bitstamp, the price briefly crossed $6,000 intraday.
While bitcoin bulls celebrate yet another milestone for the cryptocurrency, there is one major beneficiary to what has essentially been a nine year-long rally: bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. The pseudonymous creator is estimated to own 980,000 bitcoins, amassed from mining the cryptocurrency in its early days. The stash has remained untouched for years.
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What is that worth today? At $6,000 a coin, Satoshi would be worth $5.9 billion. That would put him/her/they at number 247 on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people. Satoshi is just below Wal-Mart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke and Samsung scion Jay Lee; and above Alibaba’s Joseph Tsai and María Asunción Aramburuzabala, who inherited the Corona brewery fortune.
That’s a good return for writing a piece of nine-year-old, open-source software. And arguably, even $5.9 billion is too small a reward for inventing “magic internet money.”
Source: Forbes
