Recognised as the world’s first Bitcoin billionaires by New York Post earlier this month, widespread speculation has followed regarding how both Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – collectively known as the Winklevoss twins – go about storing their fortune in the safest possible manner.
The Daily Mail has supposedly received the answer, reporting the lengths that both Tyler and Cameron go to in order to safeguard their staggering $1.3 billion worth of Bitcoin. It has been revealed that the Winklevosses actually developed their own system to protect their keys.
A quick refresher: given Bitcoin’s status as a virtual currency, it requires storage in an electronic ‘wallet’, which can only be accessed with the matching private key (or password). Should anyone gain access to the corresponding key, the stored Bitcoin can then be stolen.
So, the twins have bypassed this mainstream means of storage and elected to protect their keys by their own means. What they have done instead is print off their keys, cut them up into pieces, and proceed to store them in envelopes in vaults across the United States.
If someone did in fact manage to steal an envelope, it would be worthless on its own for they would not have access to the entire private key.
The Winklevoss twins are best known for suing Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg; claiming that their former Harvard classmate and business partner stole their idea for the revolutionary social networking site.
Using an $11m portion of the $65 million settlement that was reached with Zuckerberg, the twins went on to purchase roughly 120,000 Bitcoins in 2012, when the price of one BTC token was under $10 (USD).
Both Tyler and Cameron also founded Gemini, the first U.S. exchange licensed for Bitcoin and Ether trading.
