The price of Bitcoin rose above $ 56,000 on Friday, pushing the combined value of all bitcoins past the $ 1 trillion mark – at least in theory. This is more than the capitalization of Facebook, although Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are worth more. Bitcoin’s value has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year from $ 29,000.
I say ‘in theory’ because not all bitcoins are actually available for use. Each bitcoin (or a fraction of a bitcoin) is secured by one or more cryptographic signatures. To transfer a bitcoin, you need to know the corresponding private key. And some of these keys have been lost – and it’s impossible to know how many.
A British man, for example, says that in 2013 he threw away a hard drive containing the keys of 7,500 bitcoins – about $ 400 million at today’s price. He asked permission to dig the landfill with the hard drive, but the request was denied.
These kinds of incidents have been repeated many times over the past twelve years. This was probably a very common incident in the first two years of using bitcoin, when you could get a bitcoin for a fraction of a cent. In 2010, a man paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas – a transaction widely recognized as the first commercial bitcoin payment.
Back then, it was common for people to mine a few hundred bitcoins – or even thousands – and then forget about it, because it might be worth too little to be worth selling. By the time owners realized the bitcoins were valuable, the data might have been lost.
The world’s largest stock of bitcoins is probably the property of the pseudonym bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In the early months of the cryptocurrency, it is estimated that Nakamoto mined more than 1 million bitcoins.
Nakamoto never revealed his true identity, and he disappeared from the public eye in 2011. No one knows if he is still alive; those 1 million bitcoins have not been transferred since they were created more than a decade ago.
But if Nakamoto holds the private keys, his net worth today would be more than $ 50 billion – enough to make him one of the 20 richest people in the world.
Two other likely bitcoin billionaires are Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The Harvard alums first gained notoriety during a legal battle over the emergence of Facebook as a social network for Harvard students. After settling their legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg, they spent $ 11 million in 2013 to buy bitcoins. At a reported price of about $ 120, they might have gotten nearly 100,000 bitcoins – which would give them a net worth of a few billion dollars today.