The prediction made in 2014 by the Winklevoss twins has become a reality as Bitcoin's market capitalization surpassed 1 trillion USD, exceeding Facebook.
The market capitalization of Bitcoin reached 1.1 trillion USD, only lower than a few companies like Apple or Saudi Aramco, even surpassing Facebook, which had a market capitalization as of April 2 of 850.5 billion USD.
The prediction of Bitcoin's market capitalization surpassing Facebook was made in 2014 by Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss, the twins who won a lawsuit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, before becoming the first Bitcoin billionaires in the world in 2017.
The Winklevoss brothers first learned about Bitcoin in July 2012 at a party on the island of Ibiza. Graduating from Harvard and Oxford, they became famous after winning a lawsuit for 65 million USD from Facebook, accusing it of stealing the social network idea, and had participated in the 2008 Beijing Olympics in rowing.
"During our vacation, we happened to meet a friend who told us about Bitcoin," the Winklevoss brothers were advised by him to "start something new" after five years of battling Facebook in court.
In 2013, they used 11 million USD to buy nearly 100,000 Bitcoin at a price of 120 USD/unit. With that amount of money, the two brothers owned nearly 1% of the total Bitcoin in the world.
As two of the earliest investors in Bitcoin, the Winklevoss twins asserted that this currency has the potential for greater growth than Facebook. At the time the article was published in May 2014, Facebook's market capitalization was 151 billion USD while Bitcoin was 5.7 billion USD, trading at around 450 USD/unit.
"Bitcoin has the potential to have a stronger impact when you can give 50 cents to someone else, while Facebook is just photos... However, both are very different; Facebook is a large company," Winklevoss shared, stating that while Facebook encourages people to be socially open, Bitcoin promotes financial openness.
Contrary to Winklevoss's views, many financial institutions at that time still did not trust Bitcoin's growth potential. In response, the twins argued that skepticism about Bitcoin was similar to what the Internet faced in its early days.
In 2017, the initial investment of 11 million USD into Bitcoin by the Winklevoss brothers increased by more than 10,000%, reaching over 1 billion USD after this cryptocurrency hit 11,395 USD. They became the first Bitcoin billionaires in the world.
After more than 6 years, the prediction that 'Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook' made by the Winklevoss twins has come true. In a November 2020 interview with CNBC, Winklevoss continued to defend the view that Bitcoin will thrive more.
"Bitcoin does not need to become the best medium of exchange, it just needs to be more valuable than gold and good on a broad scale. The supply of Bitcoin is always fixed at 21 million BTC, while gold is a scarce resource. Bitcoin can be traded over the Internet, while gold is a physical asset, difficult to transport," Winklevoss said.
"Buying Bitcoin is the transaction of the century... It is gold 2.0, it will increase 30 times and dethrone gold," Winklevoss shared when Bitcoin surpassed 20,000 USD/unit at the end of 2020 and could reach 200,000 USD by 2026.
(According to The Guardian)
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