The Top 10 Most Powerful People In the Crypto-Space
With the rise and fall of cryptocurrency prices and the anonymous nature of crypto holdings list like this are really hard to make accurately. That being said this list is not exact in anyway, and the people included constitute a list of the wealthiest people who have publicly stated that they are invested into the crypto-space, and since there is no way for me to confirm the amount of coins any of these people own, any numbers and positions are only estimates based on current research. Other difficulties when trying to determine if someone is crypto-billionaire or not is that wealthy crypto investors are already successful individuals, fiat investors or money managers, so it is hard to estimate how large is their profit from crypto. Secondly early adopters of crypto rarely share an exact number of the coins they own they prefer to say things like "I own a shit ton" instead.
Yifu Guo while still a student at NYU was the first to engineer a Bitcoin miner. In 2012 he founded Avalon, the first Bitcoin mining company. The miners produced by Avalon got so popular that they were being sold as soon as they were released at substantial profit. Guo left Avalon, as many competitor companies started to build and sell mining rigs for a cheaper price. However he was the first one to do it, he grew the amount that he was able to mine and was the first person to become a millionaire by building mining rigs.
Tony Gallippi is the co-founder and current Chairman of the financial services company, BitPay, A merchant service that allows people or businesses to accept bitcoin. Tony saw a need for an electronic payment processing system for bitcoin and since co-founding Bitpay along with Stephen Pair in 2011 it has become the largest bitcoin checkout processor globally. Recently Gallippi has received some condemnation for complaining non-SegWit Bitcoin fees were too high.
Dave Carlson is a former Microsoft software engineer who discovered Bitcoin in 2010, a year after the system was launched he founded the MegaBigPower mining company from his basement and was reportedly making $8 million per month in 2016, and according to many Dave currently owns North America's largest bitcoin mining operation.
Charles Shrem IV co-founded the now-defunct startup company BitInstant in 2011, and is a founding member and former vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. In December 2014 he was sentenced to two years in prison for aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business related to the Silk Road marketplace. He was released from prison around June 2016. Then in 2017, he joined Jaxx as its director of business and community development.
Roger Ver is known as the “Bitcoin Jesus”. He is by all accounts most likely the largest single bitcoin holder in the world (not counting the FBI and Satoshi Nakamoto). Roger was already a millionaire when he got involved with Bitcoin. He was the first one to invest into a Bitcoin Startup company, and the first bitcoin evangelist. Roger also invested in Charlie Shrem’s BitInstant.
As far as early investors into the crypto space the Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler are some of the most prominent. In April 2013, the twins reportedly had already amassed over $11 million in bitcoin when they were only $120 a coin. After the brothers settled with Mark Zuckerberg in a dispute over Facebook's origins they went on to launch the digital currency exchange Gemini Trust, which was fundamental on the bitcoin futures launch. According to some accounts the brothers could currently hold 1% of Bitcoins in circulation. In December of 2016 the twins told the Financial times that bitcoin was ‘better than gold’.
Buterin is the genius behind Ethereum, now the world's third most valuable cryptocurrency behind bitcoin and ripple. At just 19 years old Vitakik Buterin met a person on a bitcoin chat forum trying to start a bitcoin blog. The owner offered five bitcoin (about $3.50 at the time) to anyone who would write an article for him. Buterin wrote for the site until its website shut down. In September 2011, another person reached out to Buterin about a new publication called Bitcoin Magazine, a position which Buterin would accept as the first co-founder, and contribute as a leading writer. After Buterin unveiled the ethereum white paper, other developers joined ranks. Dr Gavin Wood wrote the ethereum yellow paper and Joseph Lubin contributed by founding the Brooklyn-based ConsenSys, a startup which focuses on building decentralized apps. We don’t know exactly how much Vitalik owns but he’s been pretty open about his holdings. Two addresses known to be Vitalik's, have a total of ~430,000 Ethereum. With the current price of about $973, that means he is worth about ~418,390,000. Recently Vatalik was in the news for a tweet in which he threatened to leave crypto if communities in the space didn't grow up.
Chris Larsen, the co-founder and former CEO of Ripple who owns 5.19 billion XRP, according to Forbes that stash plus a 17% stake in the company makes Larsen one of the top 5 richest people in america. (Dec.2017) With Ripple's XRP coin hitting a high of $3.84, the company's co-founder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen, is now worth about $59.9 billion on paper.That puts Larsen just ahead of Larry Ellison, who ranks fifth on the Forbes 400 list with a worth of $58.4 billion, and ahead of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who rank eighth and 10th. While this makes Larsen likely the richest person on the list, but when weighed against other factors he did not qualify to make the top of the list.
That's right the FBI is one of the largest crypto holders on the planet. In September of 2012, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online marketplace, and seized all the bitcoins belonging Ross Ulbricht the founder of the silk road which he ran under the name Pirate Dread Roberts. The FBI now controls more than 144,000 bitcoins that reside at a bitcoin address that consolidates much of the seized Silk Road bitcoins. With bitcoin currently valued at around $10,000 the FBI has the keys to a BTC wallet containing over 1 billion dollars worth of crypto. That doesn't make the FBI the world's largest bitcoin holder. This honor is thought to belong to bitcoin's shadowy inventor...
Although no one is certain who Satoshi Nakamoto is; Nakamoto is a person or a group who founded bitcoin in 2009 by mining the 'genesis' block. It is estimated that they mined at least 1 million bitcoins in the currency's earliest days. Satoshi stores his wealth in a large number of bitcoin addresses, most of them holding just 50 bitcoins which would be a logistical nightmare for many, but the most savvy Bitcoin investors spread out their bitcoins across multiple wallets. That way if they lose the key to one of them or get hacked they will not loose all their coins. There is no telling who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and the world may never know but with over 1 million bitcoins, who's value is still set to rise to heights past 20,000$ a piece it's safe to say that Nakamoto is one of the richest people in the world who could be poised to become the worlds first trillion-air, and by all accounts is the most legendary member of the crypto-currency universe.
Whilst Satoshi is the richest, it's hard to argue that he/she/it is the most powerful because as long as Satoshi is operating out of complete anonymity, Satoshi has only a very limited influence beyond market manipulation.
If Satoshi wanted to make wide-ranging regulatory changes to BTC, someone would have to prove they are Satoshi which will never happen.
PS: So glad you didn't include John McAfee on this list!
I started of this article with the idea of doing a top 10 richest.. but then later decided most powerful fit more with the actual list. I think I just had to give it to Satoshi for pure Legendary status.