He mined over 400,000 BTC – when it was under $1
Then, he vanished in 2012
Who is Artforz? One of #Bitcoin’s richest men | A thread 🔥
1/ ArtForz was an electrical engineer by trade
He knew a lot about computers, but did odd jobs. His PayPal was frozen because he farmed virtual currencies for video games
By 2010, at $0.01, he was mining #Bitcoin 🤯
2/ Back in 2010, you could mine #Bitcoin on a laptop.
Satoshi Nakamoto wanted a “gentleman’s agreement” to hold off on GPU mining, but not everyone was committed
Soon, Artforz was mining with powerful graphics cards 😮
3/ ArtForz started mining in July
By August, he controlled 10% of the network
But he wasn’t alone: new miners were joining — #Bitcoin’s hashrate was rapidly rising 📈
4/ ArtForz didn’t give up: he kept adding to his “ArtFarm”
By December, he controlled 25% of the hashrate
His farm was mostly ATI Radeon HD 5970 GPUs … which he stored in cardboard boxes ‼️
5/ But ArtForz wasn't just a miner.
Early on, he reported a complex bug to Satoshi Nakamoto
It would have allowed people to spend funds in a wallet they didn’t own … Satoshi fixed the problem 👏
6/ But #Bitcoin was changing fast — people started using FPGAs and ASICs for BTC mining
ArtForz designed a few custom chips himself
This put him back up to 5% of the total hashrate 😮
7/ But ArtForz wanted to go even bigger
He planned to spend $200,000 on custom mining chips
If all went according to plan, he’d reach 200 GH/s ‼️
8/ Other miners started to pick up the pace
#Bitcoin’s hash rate skyrocketed above 7 TH/s in mid-2011
By August, Artforz held less than 1% of the total hashrate 💔
9/ That's when ArtForz started work on a mining algorithm that wouldn’t give powerful chips a such big advantag
He wrote an implementation of Scrypt…
A protocol originally created by Colin Percival for file backup encryption 🤔
10/ Other cryptocurrencies soon started using Scrypt.
These included Fairbrix and Litecoin.
In Litecoin’s launch thread, the proejct wrote: “We humbly offer a big thanks to ArtForz.” 🙏
11/ Then came the backlash: Someone figured out how to mine Scrypt coins with GPUs
In 2012, a member of SolidCoin said he implemented Scrypt for his crypto's mining design
It was 150 times faster than ArtForz claimed 🤔
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12/ Had ArtForz exploited the difference for personal gain?
ArtForz countered the accusations — he admitted GPU mining of Scrypt was always possible
But he stopped posting on the Bitcoin forums after that 🤯
13/ After #Bitcoin, we know little about Artforz...
He contributed to some video game mods, including Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program.
Then, he slowly disappeared from the internet ...
14/ To this day, Artforz's identity is unknown.
What we know is that he mined 409,650 #Bitcoin.
He sold most of them, but kept 50,000 BTC ‼️
15/ Who is Artforz?
We may never know, but if he still HODLs even a fraction of the #Bitcoin he mined...
He's one of the world's richest men ✨
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