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.

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

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 📈

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 ‼️

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

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

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 ‼️

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 💔

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

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.” 🙏

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 🤔

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 🤯

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 ...

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 ‼️

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 ✨