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Twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim that they own roughly 1% or $11 million worth of the digital currency bitcoin, wrote Nathan Popper and Peter Lattman in the New York Times yesterday.
Notorious for their legal battles with former Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, the pair is back in the news as the first “prominent figures in the largely anonymous bitcoin world to publicly disclose a big stake.”
The figure of $11 million is likely much smaller after recent bitcoin market volatility pushed the value of a single coin down 60% at one point on Thursday.
Embracing the role of pioneers, the twins brushed aside the recent, wild market gyrations, claiming that “virtual currencies are here to stay” and that they had elected to put their “money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”
It remains unclear what affect, if any, the “Winklevii” announcement will have on the young currency.
The twins don’t exactly have a reputation as charmers. Former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers famously reflected on his first encounter with Cameron and Tyler on the Harvard campus:
“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.”
Sources: New York Times; CNN Money; The Economist
