Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, stands second at $163.70 billion, with a stake of over 20% in the electric car manufacturing company he founded. It can be remembered that Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper of Bitcoin in October 2008 with a public MIT license.
Notably, on January 3, 2009, Bitcoin’s foremost block or “genesis block” was mined. This signified the rollout of the Bitcoin network, which sparked the blockchain and cryptocurrency movement.
Even though the precise figures are murky, between January and July 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto is assessed to have mined more than 1 million Bitcoin.
This implies that at prevailing Bitcoin prices, Satoshi Nakamoto’s networth is about $54 billion.
Put differently, in case the price of Bitcoin reaches $182,000, it would place Nakamoto’s net worth at about $182 billion, which is greater than the prevailing net worth of Bezos. Back in 2010, Sergio Demian Lerner, an eminent crypto academic, released a research paper assessing the Bitcoin holdings of Satoshi Nakamoto. By reading the starting blocks mined by Satoshi, Lerner assessed that 1million Bitcoin is probably possessed by Satoshi. He wrote:
“I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M USD at current exchange rate. I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will carefully analyze the source data set and come up with the exact figure, which will be very close, but nevertheless they will scream at me again.”
Even though there are several price models that forecast the price of Bitcoin to reach between $200,000 and $1 million, the top popular model is the stock-to-flow (S2F) model.
According to the S2F model, by the end of this year, Bitcoin is anticipated to reach anywhere between $100,000 and a “conservative” $288,000, utilizing a formula on the basis of a correlation between Bitcoin’s value versus the prevailing supply (stock) and the quantum of freshly mined Bitcoin reaching the market (flow).
Back in November, PlanB, the developer of the S2F model, stated:
People ask if I still believe in my model. To be clear: I have no doubt whatsoever that #bitcoin S2FX is correct and #bitcoin will tap $100K-288K before Dec2021. In fact I have new data that confirms the supply shortage is real. IMO 2021 will be spectacular. Not financial advice! pic.twitter.com/GNSxLIt7NG
— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) November 8, 2020
In case Bitcoin rallies to a high of $288,000, in accordance with the S2F model, Satoshi’s net worth would be about $288 billion, which should place the creator well above Musk and Bezos.
In the meantime, there are few more price forecasts of Bitcoin that are further on the upside. For illustration, Bloomberg had forecast that Bitcoin could hit a high of $400,000 in case it transforms into a “risk-off” reserve asset.
Nevertheless, there are no proven personal details of Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, there is no guarantee that whether the person is still alive. There have been speculations that Hal Finney, Adam Back, and Paul Le Roux could be the creator of numero uno Bitcoin. In fact, speculation is ripe that it could be even a team of developers.