Cameron Howard Winklevoss and Tyler Howard Winklevoss are twins, American rowers and entrepreneurs. The brothers are the founders of the social network ConnectU and have long sued Mark Zuckerberg, insisting that he stole the idea for his Facebook website.
Back in 2013, the twins invested approximately $11 million in bitcoins, buying around 1% of the cryptocurrency's volume, and in December 2017 became the world's first (publicly known) bitcoin billionaires. In 2013, the brothers bought bitcoins at $120 per bitcoin, and in December 2017, the cryptocurrency reached $20,000. Today, the Winklevoss twins remain one of the biggest investors in bitcoin, which is considered "an improved version of gold".
One might note that the news release of the major media outlets about twins and bitcoins has correlated markedly with the
price of the cryptocurrency itself:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/09/the-11-million-in-bitcoins-the-winklevoss-brothers-bought-is-now-worth-32-million - shortly after the release of this news the price of bitcoin jumped several times, from $200 to $1100.
The dynamics of the twins' popularity demonstrates that they gained their fame not due to their sports achievements, creation of a social network, litigation with Mark Zuckerberg and even not due to
Ben Mezrich's novel about the creation of Facebook. Their fame came precisely the month of the release of the Hollywood movie
The Social Network by popular director David Fincher.
Release date: October 1, 2010 (United States)The film shows how:
They try to create an intra-university social network and invite Zuckerberg to work as a programmer. Secretly from the twins, Mark and Eduardo begin to develop the idea they pitched of emulating real communication online: an exclusive social network for students.
One would think that a Hollywood blockbuster would give the impression of some special technological foresight of the twins, since Zuckerberg himself stole the idea from them that gave him success. That said, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the CIA and the Pentagon
have tirelessly “worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles." And perhaps The Social Network is no exception in this case.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, exactly 20 years ago, the Pentagon shut down Project LifeLog.The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence. Run by Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, […]
The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 after criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, thefacebook.com was registered the following day.
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
ix days after the site launched, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com. They claimed that he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.
Perhaps the key to Facebook's success is not Zuckerberg's implementation of the project itself or the original idea of the Winklevoss twins. Perhaps it is the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is key.
In that case, if Facebook was originally a front for the LifeLog program, and the Hollywood movie that made the Winklevoss twins famous was just a successful
public relations act by the Pentagon, then the twins' credibility as "technological visionaries" - who had a noticeable impact on today's bitcoin price - may be called into question. Moreover, if such a link does exist, then the price of bitcoin appears to be indirectly dependent on the share price of Facebook, and indeed the US military-industrial complex as a whole.
Plus, a
recently declassified report indicates that the bitcoin cryptocurrency project itself may be an NSA invention whose development at the agency began more than a quarter century ago:
National Security Agency Report Raises
Systemic Security Issues Related to Anonymous Electronic Money
A recent report prepared by the Cryptology Division of the National Security Agency's Office of Information Security Research and Technology discusses the potential for security failures in certain electronic cash systems and their likely consequences. While demonstrating concern over the attributes of non-traceable electronic money, the report points out methods that may be used to minimize security breaches and losses, including limiting the number of coins that can be affected by a single compromise, requiring traceability for large transactions or large numbers of transactions in a given period, and the creation of a mechanism to restore traceability under certain circumstances. The report contains an excellent summary of basic electronic money cryptographic tools, electronic cash protocols, authentication and signature techniques and related security issues.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970711091814/http://www.ffhsj.com/bancmail/21starch/961017.htmThis NSA report was published in full a quarter-century later on the MIT website:
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htmThe anonymous authors of the NSA report cited works of mathematician Tatsuaki Okamoto, who
was previously suspected as a C++ developer hiding under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
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