Key takeaways from Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal and Redemption
Bitcoin Billionaires is a story of two mirror twin brothers, Tyler and Cameron, better known as Winklevoss Twins. The story is authored by Ben Mezrich who had earlier written Accidental Billionaire: The Founding of Facebook. That book was adapted into an award-winning movie, The Social Network. The movie and the book had portrayed Winklevoss Twins in an unfair manner – known only for suing the Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
Bitcoin Billionaires is more like a biography that Ben Mezrich has penned down to enlighten everyone about the world of cryptocurrency through the life of Winklevoss Twins. The writing in the book has a polished elegance to it. A series of dramatic sequences, frequently starting with datelines like in a movie, makes up the structure.
The rivalry between the Winklevii and Facebook
Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg was accused by Tyler and Cameron in 2004 of stealing their idea and violating an oral contract when they were studying at Harvard University. The story opened with Cameron and Tyler agreeing for a settlement with Mark Zuckerberg for $65 million, which they had decided to invest, but couldn’t because Silicon Valley wasn’t in agreement with the source of the money. The lawsuit had created a distorted image of the twins in everybody’s mind.
Who introduced the Winklevoss Twins to Bitcoin?
Disheartened and defeated by the rejection from Silicon Valley, the twins landed in Ibiza where they came across a young boy named Charlie Shrem. Charlie was an enthusiastic and brilliant entrepreneur who ran BitInstant, a company that helped people convert money into Bitcoin instantly. He along with David Azar and Erik Voorhees, who worked for BitInstant, urged the twins to invest in cryptocurrency. The twin brothers had lost faith in the system and people kept questioning them about cryptocurrency until they got satisfied with the crypto world and its technicalities.
Why did the twins go all-in with Bitcoin?
The author shared the details with intricacy. In Act 01, the book serves as a comprehensive guide to Bitcoin and blockchain and gives a conversational introduction to the concept. Referring to Bitcoin as Gold 2.0, the author talks digital decentralized form of money that does not require any authority – no banks, no governments, no middlemen. Unlike Gold, Bitcoins are limited; there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins in existence as told by Satoshi Nakamoto. He was the first one to encode the first block called the block 0- Genesis Block.
As a result of their excitement, the twins conducted research, consulting their dad, and then invested in a web-based company that made it easier for people to acquire digital currency. After that, they used some of their Facebook winnings to purchase around 1% of the world’s outstanding Bitcoin supply in 2013.
Another great and theatrical chapter explains Winklevii’s strategy of hiding their private key (the long alphanumeric code that reflected the bitcoin holdings) in numerous safe deposit boxes by dividing the private key into three parts- alpha, bravo, and charlie, across the United States after they’d deleted all digital copies.
How did Bitcoin gain Popularity and Acceptance among People?
The nation of Cyprus had gone bankrupt in 2012 after the government had plundered over the bank savings of Cypriots. It was bad for Cypriots but good for the Bitcoin community as the distrust may have worked in Bitcoin’s favor. This shock warned the world that the safety of banking systems is an illusion that can melt into the air at any time.
In 2017, the price of Bitcoin had hit $10,000 per coin, making the Winklevoss twins a Bitcoin billionaire. On the other side, a battle was going on within Bitcoin’s community over whether cryptocurrency should be legal and separate from criminality. On one side, some libertarian anarchists were considered anti-government and anti-” fiat money”, believing that people should be free to buy drugs from dark-web supermarkets like Silk Road, which was powered entirely by bitcoin. On the other hand, there were people like The Winklevoss twins and libertarian crypto-punks who believed cryptocurrency should be legal and separate from criminality to achieve this goal.
Soon Tyler and Cameron gained the belief that bitcoin should be respected and integrated into the regulated banking system, and realized that it needed a fresh wave of entrepreneurs and companies. The new idea would be doomed to failure if consumers couldn’t buy, sell, or store virtual cash in a secure location. Hence, the book reached its denouement when the twins created Gemini- a cryptocurrency exchange.
Final Thoughts
For entrepreneurial folks who believe that some wealth can be effectively used to build bigger wealth, this book takes us closer through the journey of two brothers who took big bets and came out on the right side of fortune. We recommend you this book to understand the journey of a pair of successful billionaires, a kind of which there are not many in this world. After going through novels like these, one could develop more confidence in investing in high-risk high-reward investments.
