In early 2020, a single Bitcoin would price you round $10,000. As I kind this text, Bitcoin is sitting at an all-time excessive of $117,588. In the event you went again to 2014, you may have purchased a single Bitcoin for round $400. Why can we point out 2014 particularly? As a result of that is when investor Tim Draper purchased a batch of Bitcoins at public sale. The public sale was being held by the U.S. Marshals Service. The bitcoins had been confiscated from Silk Highway founder Ross Ulbricht. How has that funding turned out for Mr. Draper? Fairly…fairly…fairly effectively!
Tim Draper is the founding father of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a enterprise capital agency based mostly in California. He’s really a third-generation enterprise capitalist. His father, William Henry Draper III, higher referred to as Invoice Draper, based the Draper & Johnson Funding Firm in 1962 and was chairman and president of the Export-Import Financial institution of the USA. Invoice was an early investor in Skype, which finally bought to eBay for $4.1 billion.
A few of Tim’s enterprise successes embody investments in Hotmail, Baidu, and Tesla. He was additionally a really early adopter of cryptocurrency. At one level, he purchased round 41,000 bitcoins after they price simply $6. That set him again $250,000. If he nonetheless held these cash as we speak, they’d be price a bit of greater than $4.8 BILLION. Tragically, Tim misplaced that whole funding in 2014 when the bitcoin change Mt. Gox collapsed, taking with it an infinite digital fortune held by 1000’s of buyers. In some way, he wasn’t deterred. In truth, he jumped proper again into the bitcoin sport.
Frederick M. Brown/Getty Pictures
Ross Ulbricht/Silk Highway
Have you ever heard of Ross Ulbricht? As a fast refresher, Ross was arrested by the FBI in October 2013 and finally convicted of being the mastermind of Silk Highway, the darkish net drug and different illicit providers market. On the time, he was 29 years previous. He served over a decade in federal jail till he was pardoned by President Donald Trump on January 21, 2025.
Because the creator of Silk Highway, Ross took a small lower of each transaction that occurred on his web site. Be it a drug sale, a weapons buy, or an alleged murder-for-hire, Ross took a bit of slice because the intermediary.
Throughout its time working, the Silk Highway reportedly processed $9 billion price of transactions. Alongside the best way, Ross constructed up a powerful little assortment of bitcoin, 144,000 bitcoins to be exact. On the time of his arrest (October 2013), a single Bitcoin was buying and selling for round $180. So Ross’s Bitcoin stash was price roughly $25 million.
The Public sale
In mid-2014, the U.S. Marshals Service auctioned 30,000 bitcoins that previously belonged to Ulbricht. Tim Draper was one in every of 45 individuals bidding on the confiscated bitcoin throughout the 12-hour public sale. The bitcoins had been auctioned off in 9 blocks of three,000 bitcoins and one block of two,657 bitcoins. Draper was the last word winner of all ten blocks of the public sale. In whole, he paid $19 million for 29,657 bitcoins.
Draper nonetheless owns these cash as we speak. Due to renewed optimism for digital forex coming because of Donald Trump’s crypto-friendly administration, bitcoin is at a brand new all-time excessive. As I kind this text, a single Bitcoin would price you $117,588. So as we speak, Draper’s 29,657 cash are price…
$3,487,307,316
That is a $3.5 billion return on a $19 million funding 🙂
In the event you’re Tim Draper, do you throw Ross Ulbricht a pair hundred million as a comfort?
