I didn’t know that the inevitability of GPU mining was on his radar seemingly long before it materialized.

Satoshi tried so hard to keep CPU mining alive, but the GPU revolution was simply inevitable.

brave

A New Account Accused Someone of Hoarding Bitcoin's Mining Power. It Became the Biggest Hoarder of All.

Nobody knew the handle ArtForz yet. Within months it would control more mining power than anyone else alive.

Seven months earlier, Satoshi had tried to head this exact problem off. On December 12, 2009, he wrote: "We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now."

The agreement didn't hold. By July 2010, a user calling himself Nenolod, real name William Pitock, ran roughly 1,000 CPU cores and had reportedly amassed around 10 percent of all circulating Bitcoin, sparking a heated Bitcointalk thread about whether that concentration threatened the network.

One forum member jokingly offered Nenolod 31,337 BTC at a specific address if he could prove the system was broken. Others did the math out loud: was it even profitable to run 1,000 cores for the reward, or was Nenolod burning more in electricity than he was earning?

At 10:51 PM on July 24, 2010, a new account registered on Bitcointalk under the handle ArtForz. Within hours, his first posts appeared in that exact thread, adding technical skepticism about the hashrate numbers being discussed. Not a mining boast. A challenge to the math.

Nobody in that thread knew what ArtForz would become. He is widely credited, alongside Laszlo Hanyecz, as one of the first to mine Bitcoin with GPUs using private code, an approach that made the CPU fairness Satoshi had hoped to preserve obsolete within months.

By October 2010, forum moderator theymos estimated ArtForz's own mining operation controlled somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the entire network's hashing power, an estimate made in real time by people watching the blockchain, not a figure ArtForz ever confirmed himself.

The account that entered Bitcoin history by questioning whether one person should hold outsized mining power went on to become the person most cited, that same year, as holding outsized mining power.

ArtForz never revealed who he was. He stayed active in Bitcoin's technical community for a couple of years, then faded from the record entirely, one of the most consequential anonymous figures in Bitcoin's early history, remembered by a handle and a debate he didn't start.

Part of an ongoing series on Bitcoin history. This event falls on July 24, 2010.

history

[*@daily\_btc\_lore*](https://x.com/daily_btc_lore) *| Daily Bitcoin History Threads*

# A New Account Accused Someone of Hoarding Bitcoin's Mining Power. It Became the Biggest Hoarder of All.

![](https://m.stacker.news/149574)

***

Nobody knew the handle ArtForz yet. Within months it would control more mining power than anyone else alive.

## Satoshi Saw This Coming

Seven months earlier, Satoshi had tried to head this exact problem off. On December 12, 2009, he wrote: "We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now."

The agreement didn't hold. By July 2010, a user calling himself Nenolod, real name William Pitock, ran roughly 1,000 CPU cores and had reportedly amassed around 10 percent of all circulating Bitcoin, sparking a heated Bitcointalk thread about whether that concentration threatened the network.

## A Bounty and a Debate

One forum member jokingly offered Nenolod 31,337 BTC at a specific address if he could prove the system was broken. Others did the math out loud: was it even profitable to run 1,000 cores for the reward, or was Nenolod burning more in electricity than he was earning?

At 10:51 PM on July 24, 2010, a new account registered on Bitcointalk under the handle ArtForz. Within hours, his first posts appeared in that exact thread, adding technical skepticism about the hashrate numbers being discussed. Not a mining boast. A challenge to the math.

## What Nobody Saw Coming

Nobody in that thread knew what ArtForz would become. He is widely credited, alongside Laszlo Hanyecz, as one of the first to mine Bitcoin with GPUs using private code, an approach that made the CPU fairness Satoshi had hoped to preserve obsolete within months.

By October 2010, forum moderator theymos estimated ArtForz's own mining operation controlled somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the entire network's hashing power, an estimate made in real time by people watching the blockchain, not a figure ArtForz ever confirmed himself.

## The Irony

The account that entered Bitcoin history by questioning whether one person should hold outsized mining power went on to become the person most cited, that same year, as holding outsized mining power.

ArtForz never revealed who he was. He stayed active in Bitcoin's technical community for a couple of years, then faded from the record entirely, one of the most consequential anonymous figures in Bitcoin's early history, remembered by a handle and a debate he didn't start.

***

*Part of an ongoing series on Bitcoin history. This event falls on July 24, 2010.*