Virgil Griffith (born 1983), also known as Romanpoet, is an American programmer. He worked extensively on the

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (Abbreviation: ETH; sign: Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capita ...

cryptocurrency platform, designed the

Tor2web Tor2web (pronounced "Tor to Web") is a software project to allow Tor hidden services to be accessed from a standard browser without being connected to the Tor network. It was created by Aaron Swartz and Virgil Griffith. History Tor is a networ ...

proxy along with

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...

, and created the Wikipedia indexing tool

WikiScanner WikiScanner (also known as Wikipedia Scanner) was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the ow ...

. He has published papers on

artificial life Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry ...

and

integrated information theory Integrated information theory (IIT) attempts to provide a framework capable of explaining why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious, why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appe ...

. Griffith was arrested in 2019, and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...

. On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sanctions and is currently in a federal low-security prison in Pennsylvania.

Life

Griffith was born in

Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% fr ...

and grew up in nearby

Tuscaloosa Tuscaloosa ( ) is a city in and the seat of Tuscaloosa County in west-central Alabama, United States, on the Black Warrior River where the Gulf Coastal and Piedmont plains meet. Alabama's fifth-largest city, it had an estimated population of ...

. He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002, and then attended the

University of Alabama The University of Alabama (informally known as Alabama, UA, or Bama) is a public research university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Established in 1820 and opened to students in 1831, the University of Alabama is the oldest and largest of the publi ...

, studying cognitive science. He transferred to

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

in 2004, but returned to graduate '' cum laude'' from Alabama in August 2007. In 2008, he was a visiting researcher at the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

. In 2014 Griffith received his Ph.D. from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

under

Christof Koch Christof Koch ( ; born November 13, 1956) is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for B ...

in computation and neural systems with funding from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Homeland Security. He has been a research scientist at the Ethereum Foundation since 2016. At the time of his arrest in 2019, Griffith was a resident of Singapore and was allegedly investigating the possibility of renouncing his US citizenship.

Computer career

Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC, and HOPE. At Interz0ne 1 in 2002, he met Billy Hoffman, a Georgia Tech student, who had discovered a security flaw in the campus magnetic ID card system called "BuzzCard". He and Hoffman collaborated to study the flaw and attempted to give a talk about it at Interz0ne 2 in April 2003. A few hours before the presentation, he and Hoffman were served with a cease and desist order from corporate lawyers acting for

Blackboard Inc. Blackboard Inc. was an American educational technology company with corporate headquarters in Reston, VA. It was known for Blackboard Learn, a learning management system. It merged with Anthology in late 2021, with the future name of the combin ...

Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit alleging that they had stolen

trade secrets Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily a ...

and violated both the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

and the Economic Espionage Act. The lawsuit was settled later that year. On August 14, 2007, Griffith released a software utility,

, that tracked Wikipedia article edits from unregistered accounts back to their originating IP addresses and identified the corporations or organizations to which they belonged. Griffith described his mission in developing WikiScanner as "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike." In 2008, together with

, Griffith designed the

proxy. In 2016, he was fired from the Tor team for attempting to sell de-anonymized Tor2web traffic. On

, Griffith writes Ethereum "is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games", and "enables powerful economic vehicles we don’t yet understand", by bringing

cooperative game theory In game theory, a cooperative game (or coalitional game) is a game with competition between groups of Player (game), players ("coalitions") due to the possibility of external enforcement of cooperative behavior (e.g. through contract law). Those ...

into new domains. As of 2019 Griffith's homepage stated that he worked for the Ethereum Foundation.

Prosecution

On November 28, 2019, Griffith was arrested by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

for providing "highly technical information” to

, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea

launder money Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source. It is a crime in many jurisdictions ...

and evade sanctions." The charges stem from his unsanctioned participation in an April 2019 blockchain and cryptocurrency conference held in

Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populat ...

. During and after the conference, Griffith was alleged to have discussed means through which North Korea could use cryptocurrency to evade economic sanctions. Upon Griffith's arrest, Ethereum co-founder

Vitalik Buterin Vitaly "Vitalik" Buterin (born 1994) is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer and founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding ''Bitcoin Magazine'' in 2011. In 2014, Buterin deployed Eth ...

initiated an online campaign for his release which, according to one source, could not garner many supporters. On September 28, 2021, Griffith pleaded guilty at a hearing in which he expressed remorse. He was sentenced on April 12, 2022, to 63 months in prison, with 10 months already considered time served from his pre-trial detention. As of July 2022 he is in FCI Allenwood Low, a low-security federal prison in Pennsylvania.

Writing

* Virgil Griffith, Markus Jakobsson, 2005.
Messin' with Texas: Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records
'. . * Virgil Griffith, Larry S. Yaeger, 2005, MIT Press.
Ideal Free Distribution in Agents with Evolved Neural Architectures
'. Indiana University School of Informatics and Department of Cognitive Science. * Griffith is listed as one of the contributors (as "Virgil G") in Elonka Dunin (2006). ''The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes And Cryptograms''.

Carroll & Graf Carroll & Graf Publishers was an American publishing company based in New York City, New York, known for publishing a wide range of fiction and non-fiction by both new and established authors, as well as issuing reprints of previously hard-t ...

. . * Two articles in Markus Jakobsson, Steven Myers (2007) ''Phishing and Counter-Measures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft''.

Wiley-Interscience John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in ...

. .

References

External links

*
arXiv publications

Binary Revolution webcast
17 May 2005
Santa Fe Institute talk
{{DEFAULTSORT:Griffith, Virgil 1983 births American computer programmers American technology writers California Institute of Technology alumni Indiana University alumni Living people Participants in American reality television series Writers about computer security Writers from Tuscaloosa, Alabama University of Alabama alumni People associated with Ethereum