LAST week, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for a Facebook-like network, were widely declared the world’s first Bitcoin billionaires. That statement should have come with several qualifications. The first being that the American entrepreneurs are in fact each only half billionaires, since they are two. The second that really they are just the first Bitcoin billionaires whose names we know. Many unidentified others are believed to own over a billion dollars in the digital currency.

But the idea that the Winklevosses are currently sitting on a fortune makes for a good story. It says a great deal about their image that they are treated as a kind of strange, billionaire super-organism, not two but one. This is the pair that Mark Zuckerberg once nicknamed, creating an insult that stuck, the Winklevii. Their backstory will be familiar to many from the 2010 hit film The Social Network, which portrayed how the two Harvard students and champion rowers in 2002 presented their idea for a college social networking site to a fellow student named Mark Zuckerberg, who promptly launched his own version of it, Facebook.

Facebook, naturally, described it as fiction, while the Winklevii called it “non-fiction”.

The bitter dispute that followed, and which ultimately resulted in a $65 million settlement being awarded to the brothers, is also charted in The Social Network, which caricatures the brothers as privileged figures and unstoppable athletic Adonises. At one point in it, one of the brothers, played by Armie Summers, jokes that they if they wanted to threaten Zuckerberg they wouldn’t need to hire thugs. “We can do it ourselves. I’m 6ft 5, 220 pounds and there’s two of me.”

The gamble they made on Bitcoin could be where they prove themselves to be more than the twins that lost Facebook. The Winkelvosses were introduced to the currency, essentially a digital token that can be bought and traded without the need for a third party and which is recorded and controlled through software called blockchain, after they had finished their MBAs at Oxford. In 2013, with some of their Facebook settlement, they bought around 100,000 coins, each worth roughly $120. Now each coin is worth nearly $12,000. Optimists theorise that ultimately one Bitcoin could even reach a value of several million dollars. Why this rapid growth? A limit has been set on the number of Bitcoins in existence – no more than 21 million – making it a rare commodity.

There’s little doubt that the Winklevosses are not the only Bitcoin billionaires. BitInfoCharts, for instance, lists four addresses worth more than $1 billion, and given that its common for people to distribute over several addresses it’s probable that there are many more. It has, for instance, frequently been claimed that the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, a person so shrouded in secrecy some even theorise he or she may be more than one individual, owns over a million Bitcoins.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, has many sceptics and critics. Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, last week on CNBC, declared Bitcoin a “dangerous speculative bubble”. But nevertheless many believe that, even if Bitcoin itself isn’t the answer, some other currency based around the “distributive ledger technology” on which it relies to create value, will be.

Technology writer John Biggs has aptly described the Winklevosses as “the representatives of the Bitcoin nerds to Wall Street”. They are playing a part – they have, for instance, created Gemini, their equivalent of a Nasdaq for digital currency – in making the currency legitimate and acceptable. And that certainly required some work, since for a long time Bitcoin had a very shady image, strongly associated with dark web dealings, including the functioning of the Silk Road, the illicit marketplace that was closed down by the FBI in 2013.

Born in 1981, to a father, Howard, who was a business school professor and had already made a small fortune from an accounting software venture, the brothers have attributed their success to the fact they are twins. Cameron Winklevoss has said: “One of the things that’s helped is that even though on paper and on first glance we might look and appear like the same person, we have much different personalities and given the fact that I’m left handed and he’s right handed, we generally approach problems and different things from different angles.”

The Winkelvii, however, are not examples of out-and-out success, but of narrowly losing. They competed in the men’s pairs rowing in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for example, and came in sixth. In 2011 they appealed their 2008 settlement of $65 million with Facebook, on the grounds it didn’t represent the true value of the company, but lost.

They remain fighters, however, who don’t give up. “I’ve had plenty of people ask me why the Winklevosses can’t just be happy with $65 million and move on,” said Aaron Sorkin, writer of The Social Network. These guys were built to win – they’re not just gonna ‘move on'.”

The fight to make Bitcoin the Facebook of the currency world, however is likely to bring more challenges. Earlier this year their plan to allow stock traders to buy and sell Bitcoin without needing to set up their own Bitcoin wallet, was knocked back by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. "We began this journey almost four years ago, and are determined to see it through,” said Tyler, following the setback. “We see Bitcoin,” he added, “as potentially the greatest social network of all.”

Are they right? “I remember when people said Facebook was a fad,” Tyler said in an interview this year. “We saw this movie play out already with Facebook. We feel like we’re in the same movie again, just with a different cast of characters.”