The Crypto Kings
The year was 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Many other cryptocurrencies have been created ever since, and are commonly known as alternative coins, or altcoins.
Formal Definition Of Cryptocurrency
According to Jan Lansky, a famous cryptocurrency researcher, cryptocurrency can be defined as a system which must meet six conditions.
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“The system does not require a central authority, distributed achieve consensus on its state.”
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“The system keeps an overview of cryptocurrency units and their ownership.”
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“The system defines whether new cryptocurrency can be created. If new cryptocurrency units can be created, the system defines the circumstances of their origin and how to determine the ownership of these new units.”
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“Ownership of cryptocurrency units can be proved exclusively cryptographically.”
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“The system allows transactions to be performed in which ownership of the cryptographic units is changed. A transaction statement can only be issued by an entity proving the current ownership of these units.”
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“If two different instructions for changing the ownership of the same cryptographic units are simultaneously entered, the system performs at most one of them.”
Ever since they were created, they have been seen as being similar to Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, and economic bubbles. Furthermore, one of the features that cryptocurrencies lack when compared to a credit card is the consumer protection against fraud.
However, this didn’t stop people from investing in them and eventually many made a fortune out of it. Many other resorted to Bitcoin gambling and managed to make quite a bit of money from it as well.
Let’s take a look at the Winklevoss brothers for instance. The twins educated at the Harvard University and the University of Oxford are the co-founders of Winklevoss Capital. After the Facebook fiasco, they began investing in Bitcoin in a big way in 2012 and also built a lucrative New York based cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini, where investors can buy and sell digital currencies.
Today they have a net worth between $900 million and $1.5 billion dollars in cryptocurrencies.
Feel free to take a look at the infographic which follows to see the list of the top 15 people who made a fortune with cryptocurrencies, and are now called the Crypto Kings.