Virgil Griffith


Virgil Griffith, also known as Romanpoet, is an American programmer, known for being the creator of WikiScanner, an indexing tool for Wikipedia. He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. He also worked extensively on the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform. Griffith was arrested in 2019 for allegedly giving an Ethereum related presentation in North Korea, and moving cryptocurrency between South and North Korea.

Life

Griffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa. He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002, and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science. He transferred to Indiana University 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. In 2014 Griffith received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology under Christof Koch in computation and neural systems. 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.. Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Economic Espionage Act. The lawsuit was later settled.
On August 14, 2007, Griffith released a software utility, WikiScanner, 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 Aaron Swartz, Griffith designed the Tor2web proxy.
On Ethereum, 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 into new domains. As of 2019 Griffith's homepage stated that he worked for the Ethereum Foundation.

Arrest

On November 28, 2019, Griffith was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for providing "highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions." The charges stem from his unsanctioned participation in an April 2019 blockchain and cryptocurrency conference held in Pyongyang, North Korea. During and after the conference, Griffith was alleged to have discussed means through which North Korea could use cryptocurrency to evade economic sanctions.

Writing