Who has the fattest bitcoin wallet- the FBI? Satoshi?

When I first got into crypto currency, I wanted to learn everything that I could possibly learn about it. I needed to know how the blockchain works, how currencies are put into circulation, who invented them and for what reason, and of course, who has the most.

This last question was not an easy one to answer. I scoured the internet looking for an answer, and got mixed results. The public only has access to how many bitcoins are in one wallet so just because a particular wallet has the most bitcoins in it, the owner of that wallet does not necessarily hold the most bitcoin. Someone else may own more bitcoin spread out across many wallets. What I found is that the largest bitcoin wallet today contains 124,178 BTC as stated on "Bitcoin Rich List". This is the equivalent of $234,816,872 at todays exchange rate of 1BTC to $1890.97 USD. According to other sources such as a series of articles published in 2013, the largest bitcoin wallet contains over 215,000 BTC. This wallet was controlled by Silk Road pioneer, Ross Ulbricht. The Silk Road was known at the time to be the owner of the largest bitcoin wallet with hundreds of millions of USD worth in their control.

Although this may help to answer the question of how many bitcoins are in "the fattest wallet", this does not answer the question of who owns the most bitcoin overall. Who owns the most bitcoin is a much harder question to answer. Many believe that the largest owner of bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of bitcoin. Satoshi is said to have mined nearly a million bitcoins. If he does in fact still have a million bitcoins, he would have a fortune worth about $1,890,970,000 USD, or almost 1.9 billion dollars. This is a huge sum of money and if Satoshi even touched (made a transaction with) these old coins, chaos could result on the markets as this is a huge percentage of all bitcoin. If he were to cash out his entire stash, the value of bitcoin could collapse in an instant. With a great deal of bitcoin comes a great deal of power.

Yes, Satoshi may be the biggest owner of bitcoin, but as he is anonymous, much of what we "know" is really just speculation. Some of the biggest bitcoin fortunes belong to investors such as the Winklevoss brothers who purchased approximately $11 million of bitcoin after a collapse in 2013 which would today be worth over $173 million. This would be a huge return on investment. Of course what they did with all of the coins they purchased, we can only guess.

If I learned anything from this research, it's that we should all hope that Satoshi doesn't spend his bitcoin.

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--Aaron