Thread by @pete_rizzo_

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 ✨