— Ch. 1 · Birmingham To Caltech —
Virgil Griffith.
~2 min read · Ch. 1 of 5
Virgil Griffith was born in 1983 and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002. His academic path took him to the University of Alabama where he studied cognitive science. He transferred to Indiana University Bloomington in 2004 before returning to graduate cum laude in August 2007. In 2008, he served as a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. The journey concluded with his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2014 under Christof Koch. Funding for this research came from the U.S. Departments of Energy and Homeland Security.
WikiScanner And Tor2web
On the 14th of August 2007, Griffith released WikiScanner to track Wikipedia edits back to their source IP addresses. He described his mission as creating minor public-relations disasters for organizations he disliked. This tool identified corporations or groups behind unregistered account changes. Two years later, he designed the Tor2web proxy alongside Aaron Swartz. Their collaboration aimed to bridge anonymous networks with standard web browsers. Griffith worked on the Ethereum platform starting around 2016. He stated that Ethereum enabled powerful economic vehicles yet to be understood. In 2016, he was fired from the Tor team after attempting to sell de-anonymized traffic data.