Tyler Winklevoss is the half of the Winklevoss twins who rose to more fame after they were named as the first-ever high profile bitcoin-based billionaires.
Tyler and his twin, Cameron Winklevoss, was first known when they sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea for Facebook, which they got a huge settlement of $65 million. They used a portion of their money to buy nearly 1% of the Bitcoin reserves.
Although the Winklevoss twins never did disclose the exact return they got from their bitcoin investment, the estimated size for the Winklevoss stake is nearly 100,000 bitcoin mark. From an interview with Tyler and Cameron, the Winklevoss twins said that they felt that investing in Bitcoin was a risk worth taking, explaining that the cryptocurrency is like a better version of gold and is expected to be worth trillions in the future.
Tyler Winklevoss has also said, in support of bitcoin bulls, that bitcoin is a form of digital gold. He said that bitcoin is scarce as gold is, saying that the two are both fungible and divisible. However, according to the co-founder of the Gemini Cryptocurrency Exchange, bitcoin is better at being gold compared to the real gold as it is more portable than gold ever is.
Winklevoss also continued with the metaphor, saying that ether is like a digital oil that helps fuel the Ethereum blockchain, the protocol layer where tokens can be built by decentralized applications which are using or wants to create their own.
When Tyler Winklevoss was asked if Litecoin can be described as the silver to bitcoin’s gold, he replied that Litecoin more closely matches a test net. It is a simulated blockchain version that developers build in support of their designs without a lot of risks of losing real money. According to him, the reason for him describing Litecoin as a testnet instead of silver to bitcoin’s gold is that the two cryptocurrencies are much alike. The only difference, he said, is that Litecoin has a much smaller market cap.
Tyler Winklevoss has also had a great response following Bill Gates, a famed anti-cryptocurrency billionaire, saying that if he could bet against bitcoin, he would do that. It is not a secret how the Microsoft co-founder thinks about bitcoin, but unfortunately, he didn’t know that shorting bitcoin is now possible and the other half of the Winklevoss twins was quick to tell him so.
Tyler Winklevoss tweeted directly to Bill Gates that there is a straightforward way to short bitcoin through CBOE bitcoin futures contract. He even said to the billionaire to put where his mouth is.
Tyler and his brother Cameron heavily invested in Bitcoin in 2013, and several years later, the $11 million investment has been multiplied massively.