Tyler Winklevoss, photo by Techrunch
Tyler Winklevoss, Co-Founder, and CEO of Gemini regretted spending over 300 BTC in 2014 for a ticket to space. With Bitcoin’s price at $800 at the time, the ticket was worth around $250,000 from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
As the price of the largest cryptocurrency has surged since then, Winklevoss referred to his move “a Bitcoin pizza moment.”
Virgin Galactic is a company specializing in commercial spaceflights within the Virgin Group, founded by the prominent entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. Famously, the firm sells tickets for flights in space for $250,000. Despite the hefty price tag, their website indicates that all available tickets have been purchased by “Future Astronauts.”
Among those are the Winklevoss twins. Cameron and Tyler made the news in 2014 as each of them completed the transaction by paying in bitcoins. More specifically, with Bitcoin’s price at $800 at the time, they had to transfer 312.5 BTC each.
Tyler announced it in their blog, writing that both Bitcoin and commercial space flight could be potential technological game-changers:
“It is in this vein that Cameron and I contemplate our tickets into space – as seed capital supporting a new technology that may forever change the way we travel, purchased with a new technology that may forever change the way we transact.”
It’s worth noting that Virgin Galactic hasn’t completed a fight yet. The company plans to start with 16 flights later this year and to raise the number to 270 by 2023.
Ever since the execution of the transaction, Bitcoin saw quite the price increase. Trading now at around $9,600, it represents a 6-year gain of 1100%. The 312.5 bitcoins spent in 2014 have a total value of $3 million. Thus, the Winklevoss twins’ tickets might be the most expensive ones as of today.
Tyler seemed to realize this as years later, he said: “I won’t make that mistake again.”
He also compared the purchase of the two tickets for space with the famous Bitcoin Pizza Moment from 2010. Back then, Laszlo Hanyecs made arguably the most famous transaction in BTC’s history. He paid 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas on May 22nd, which later became known as the Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Even though the largest digital asset has skyrocketed since 2010 and 2014, spending it could actually accelerate mass adoption. This leads to a legitimate question – should the investors keep it, hoping that it will raise its value again or spend it and help for adoption?