In May 2017, Bulgarian law enforcement seized BTC 213,519 during a crackdown on an organized crime ring that was circumventing taxes. These Bitcoins are worth USD 1.4 billion as of this writing on 10 July 2018. If the Bulgarian government is still holding onto these Bitcoins then it has the second largest stash of Bitcoins in the world, only surpassed by Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, the Bulgarian government has refused to discuss the status of the seized Bitcoins, so it can’t be known for sure whether it is still holding them. Simultaneously, in any democratic country, large flows of government money must be reported, so if these Bitcoins were sold it would probably be officially documented and known by the public.
By far, the largest Bitcoin stash in the world is held by the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto mined BTC 1.1 million during the time after the genesis block when practically no one else was mining Bitcoin. During that era, it was possible to accrue large amounts of Bitcoin with just CPU mining, as opposed to now where warehouses full of ASICs that use as much electricity as a city mine far less Bitcoin than those CPUs. Nakamoto’s alleged accumulation is currently worth USD 7.26 billion.
Both stashes in discussion are split between multiple Bitcoin addresses to maintain anonymity. The biggest Bitcoin wallets in the world belong to major cryptocurrency exchanges Bitfinex and Binance with BTC 180,168 (USD 1.2 billion) and BTC 158,779 (USD 1.06 billion) respectively. Of course, these Bitcoins are the property of customers, so no single known individual or organization comes close to Bulgaria’s and Nakamoto’s stashes.
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