The Winklevoss twins are now Bitcoin billionaires | Hacker News Reader

The Winklevoss twins are now Bitcoin billionaires

theverge.com

Related discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836087

Good for them. The other thread here on this was filled with people complaining about how lucky the Winklevii were here. Most success scenarios I'm aware of are heavily driven by chance. People tend to attribute success to luck whenever they don't think it was deserved (it's a very "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves" type of arrangement). In this case, I find attempts to discredit these guys as quite absurd. They took an early plunge into a technology they found had potential and built one of the finest exchanges for it (Gemini).

as my investment banker grandfather was keen to drill into me very early, the proper ending to this sentence is “[...] when they sell.”

Oh yeah, I learned this lesson this month.

My stock holdings doubled in a relatively short time a few weeks ago... and then this last week (and now today) they came back down. I'm slowly learning the lesson that for nearly most people speculative investing is a waste of time and money. I'm now going to be deleting all of my apps where I "check" things like I check the news when I wake up every morning, will now just peak in every other month or so.

This is true for anyone who has substantial wealth in a single asset class, and also relatively meaningless. You can't get liquidity without impacting the price, especially if your reputation is closely tied to the asset.

When you are talking wealth, you use dollars as a unit of account so you don't have to compare bitcoin addresses to tech equity to Manhattan skyscrapers to oil tankers. Obviously all those things are hard to liquidate quickly especially when you own a lot of the supply.

For the actual human expenses, there are plenty of private bankers who will figure out how to lend you USD against those assets for whatever you want to buy.

Can anyone give an credible estimate of the net currency flow between bitcoins and conventional Forex market? (no investments in mining)

By all means be Bitcoin fan, but unless you can answer my question, you know nothing.

Every time the market sell side , the BTC value drops like a stone. Bitcoin has large market liquidity risk and Winklevoss brothers have liquidity problem. Bitcoin markets don't seem to have any resiliencey and breath. There are no controls for market manipulation.

I cannot answer your question but BTC comprises $191 billion market cap out of $342 billion market cap of all crypto currencies. Perhaps they'll diversify into other coins, withdraw to Fiat via this too.

Market liquidity problem means that they can't diversify easily. Any large withdraw would collapse the price.

That's why I was asking the question. Market cap can be billions or trillion, especially in manipulated markets, but if you can't withdraw your money with that price it was not real value.

Looking forward to a similar article in 10 years:

"The Winklevoss twins are not Bitcoin bankrupts"

One day only about 1 bitcoin (worth 1 trillion) will be actually tradable. Everyone else will be holding.

Meritocracy in action.

They took the risk, gambled on Bitcoin when others were too afraid to. They were rewarded for their gamble. Seems fair to me.

If you're already a multi millionaire, gambling a few million on bitcoin isn't really a risk. If you're poor, you aren't "afraid to" take a gamble - you can't afford too. Maybe this is all fair by the rules of the current economy. But maybe the rules aren't fair to begin with.

> gambling a few million on bitcoin isn't really a risk

They didn't just invest a few million, they also stuck their necks out in a very public way and made efforts to bring Bitcoin to the investment masses (via the ETF). A failure in Bitcoin would have reflected very poorly reputation-wise.

Again, a slight social hit that is completely excusable (no investor is perfect) is a far cry from losing your home, savings, car, job, etc like a middle class person would have.

Ah, so what non-millionaires like me are doing wrong is we're not starting a bitcoin ETF. I'll have to start one in the spare time between my two jobs. Meritocracy!

And if everyone started out with the same amount of money in life you'd still be bemoaning the unequal distribution of advantageous genetic traits.

I'm not saying everything must be equal. It's people saying "meritocracy" who act like everything already is.

Oh the world is definitely not a pure meritocracy, I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.

Sure, and how did they have the money to gamble (sic) on Bitcoin?

They were entrepreneurial enough to get entangled with Zuckerberg and Facebook.

And to do that they had to be at Harvard at the right time, which involved being born in the right circumstances of course.

By successfully pursuing their claim against Facebook till the end to the tune of 65million USD

Of which they put 1/5th of the Facebook shareholder money into Bitcoin

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