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Dossier

GPU mining pioneerEarly adoption

ArtForz

Built the first Bitcoin GPU mining farm.

Known as ArtForzActive Jul 2010

Speculation, not fact — "ArtForz" is a pseudonym; his real-world identity was never established. Hash-power figures are self-reported.

Why they matter

ArtForz opened the GPU arms race that ended the CPU-mining era within months, reshaping the economics of mining and the early debates about hash-power concentration and fairness.

Profile

A pseudonymous early developer who, on 18 July 2010, ran the first GPU mining farm — his "Artfarm" of Radeon cards — using private OpenCL mining code. By his own report he mined ~1,700 BTC in six days, and at his 2010 peak was estimated to control 20–30% of the network's hash power. He later created Tenebrix, the first scrypt-based coin and a forerunner of Litecoin, then disappeared.

Timeline

  1. GPU mining begins — the arms race starts

Sources