Ripple CTO Reveals How Many Bitcoins He Has Mined

In a recent social media post, David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, revealed that he had mined a total of 250 Bitcoins during the cryptocurrency’s early days. 

This comes after a user shared an image of Schwartz wearing a red “Bitcoin miner” T-shirt. 

Schwartz first got involved in Bitcoin back in 2011. By the time he discovered Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic creator of the leading cryptocurrency, had already left their last message.

“I bought it from someone who advertised on an early bitcoin forum. It was just cool to use bitcoin to buy something,” Schwartz recalled  

In 2023, the Ripple executive admitted that he wished he had discovered the cryptocurrency earlier. He stated that he was never able to experience seeing the price of BTC drop to as low as $2.50. 

Bitcoin was already worth around $30 when Schwartz started mining it, according to his latest post on X. 

Last April, Schwartz revealed that he had sold his Bitcoin holdings in order to buy XRP and Ethereum (ETH). 

There was also some (rather baseless) speculation about the Ripple CTO being Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Schwartz has dispelled such rumors on various occasions.  

“I have almost the entire skill set needed to have been Satoshi. It’s certainly plausible that I was part of a group. But, nevertheless, it’s not true. I didn’t find out about Bitcoin until 2011,” Schwartz tweeted back in 2021.

Schwartz has repeatedly criticized Bitcoin, focusing on its high energy consumption and the scalability issues stemming from its proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm.