Bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) was close to breaking the $20,000 milestone over the weekend, hitting a high of $19,771 on Sunday. At that price, Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, would have been worth $19.4 billion, or the 44th richest person in the world in the Forbes rich list, Quartz reported.
Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to possess 980,000 Bitcoins. These coins are likely to have been obtained from mining the nine-year-old cryptocurrency early on. The funds have stayed untouched for years.
Bitcoin’s inventor would be behind Swedish clothing brand scion Stefan Persson (son of H&M founder Erling Persson), Apple founder Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Trailing Nakamoto are billionaire Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (who called bitcoin “Enron in the making“) and Theo Albrecht, Jr., an heir to the German discount retailing empire Aldi.
In October, Satoshi Nakamoto was ranked 247th on the Forbes rich list with an estimated fortune of $5.9 billion. That was when Bitcoin set a then-new record of $6,000 a coin.