Vitalik Buterin was born in Kolomna, Russia, on January 31, 1994. A crypto-activist in his early days, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and Ethereum after experimenting with other projects. His precociousness has made him one of the most influential people and one of those who have contributed most to building the crypto galaxy.
His parents, Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Amaline, emigrated with him to Canada in search of better job opportunities when Vitalik was 6 years old. Once in Canada, during his primary school years, Buterin stood out for his ability to learn and understand. Because of this, he was moved to a class for gifted children. It was here that he began to develop his skills in mathematics, programming and economics.
However, as if it were a stereotype, his high IQ was offset by difficulties interacting socially. That is why he took refuge in real-time strategy online games.
Vitalik Buterin and the magic of his spell
Vitalik admits to having been hooked on the game World of Warcraft between 2007 and 2010. That social isolation spent leveling up as a spellcaster had, according to him, an impact on his research that led to the creation of Ethereum.
Vitalik himself recounted that at one point the company Blizzard (owner of the game) made changes to parameters that affected one of Vitalik’s characters. What exactly happened was that a game update removed the Siphon Life spell he used on his warlock character. According to his account, that experience showed him the most negative side of centralized development systems. He could not understand why the company could take away something that had cost him so much to obtain.
“At first I was skeptical, and I didn’t understand how it was possible for (Bitcoin) to have value without any physical backing. But little by little I started to find it more and more interesting.”
Vitalik Buterin – About Me
While it is not the end of the world, for someone in the middle of adolescence it can be quite a dramatic event. Be that as it may, Vitalik Buterin came into contact with Bitcoin technology after this event. His father, interested in the cryptocurrency, tried unsuccessfully to draw him into the blockchain world.
Beginnings with Blockchain technology
Although Bitcoin initially failed to win Vitalik over, in 2011 he decided to team up with Mihai Allise to co-found Bitcoin Magazine. Vitalik became a tireless writer, going on to write hundreds of articles for the magazine.
Shortly afterwards, in 2012, Buterin began his studies at Waterloo University. However, at some point during that year he realized he would not be able to continue his studies alongside his crypto development work. He therefore decided to drop out and focus on his various activities in the crypto world. After this, Buterin began to deepen his research into many other cryptography projects. That was when he realized how limited the ability to extend functionality was in most of them.
Hacktivism and development at Calafou
Buterin worked closely with Amir Taaki, a renowned Bitcoin developer. Taaki and his development team used a series of self-managed social centers in Barcelona as their workplace. It was in Cabrera d’Anoia, at the Calafou space, that Buterin became heavily involved in the development of Dark Wallet. This project, developed with the Libbitcoin, library, is a Bitcoin wallet focused on anonymity and preventing financial censorship. It is designed to evade persecution of any individual by a centralized power. The Dark Wallet project was driven by Taaki and Pablo Caedes between Calafou and the kasa de la muntanya.
Bitcoin CyberSquat – BBC
During that period, Taaki and Buterin worked on parallel projects through a mailing list, just as the cypherpunks. did. This list, created as unSystem, was a meeting point for different developers seeking to define cryptocurrency projects. Forbes covered the story of Dark Wallet, which received $20,000 in donations for its development in the first few days. The involvement of Cody Wilson, known for creating the printable gun design known as The Liberator, was a point of disagreement within the community. During this stage Vitalik was developing pybitcointools, a library of python tools for Bitcoin.
Defense Distributed – Dark Wallet
The development of Ethereum
With the aim of solving the flaws he believed he had detected in projects such as Bitcoin, Buterin began developing Ethereum and published its whitepaper in 2013. Following this initial progress, Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, published Ethereum’s technical paper. It describes how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) works. The EVM is Ethereum’s core technology, on which the rich scripting language shows its full potential.
After a long crowdfunding campaign, Buterin and his team were able to launch the first fully functional version of Ethereum, Frontier, in 2015. With its activation, the Ethereum platform began to take off and tech giants such as IBM and Microsoft showed interest in the project.
In May 2016, Buterin returned to Russia for the first time since moving to Canada with his parents. During his visit he met with Russian ministers and representatives of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. In 2017, Vitalik Buterin entered the top 10 of Fortune‘s “40 Under 40” ranking of the most influential young people and made the list of the 600 brightest people under 30 by Forbes, while the newspaper Vedomosti named him professional of the year.
Vitalik Buterin’s fortune is entirely unknown; however, it is estimated at 350,003.57 ETH. The reason is that the address 0xAb5801a7D398351b8bE11C439e05C5B3259aeC9B on the Ethereum network belongs to him. However, Vitalik himself answers this question in a Twitter thread.
Ok, I am going to just stop commenting on bitcoin issues almost entirely and focus on ethereum tech.
I think the community needs to go through *a lot* of healing, and the firebrands on all sides that are *so sure* that their side is righteous and the other evil deeply worry me.3,3346:16 – Nov 14, 2017Twitter Ads info and privacy971 people are talking about this
Vitalik Buterin – Tech Crunch 2017
Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum today
Ethereum is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization. Ethereum is being used by thousands of applications, from developers and companies around the world alike, and has gradually built a supreme reputation in the crypto world.
In March 2017, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance was established with more than 500 members. Members include well-known companies such as Microsoft, MasterCard, Intel and Ernst & Young. All of them with the firm purpose of developing Ethereum and applications built on this technology.
Despite all this, Ethereum is not yet a perfect technology, as it continues to suffer from scalability problems. That is why the Ethereum Foundation and its developers and contributors seek to improve it. Hard work that can be seen at all times thanks to the community’s high level of development activity.
Vitalik Buterin – Explaining Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin, for his part, swapped Zug for Singapore, where he heads the Asian division of the Ethereum Foundation. He still devotes much of his time to Ethereum’s development. However, he hopes that in the future he can step back a little from developing the currency to focus on other things related to Ethereum.
Although Vitalik has not been alone in building Ethereum, he has been a very important part of the project. Moreover, he has always been its public face, just as Steve Jobs was for Apple. A marked contrast with Bitcoin, where there has never been a true figurehead, since no one knows the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Without a doubt, Vitalik Buterin is outstanding, both for his intelligence and for his beliefs in cryptocurrencies. No one knows what the coming years will bring for its development. But it would not be surprising if he continues to push the cryptocurrency industry forward as he has done so far.
Notable remarks
Buterin is also well known for his high activity on Twitter. His posts on the social network have left messages such as these:
“Ok, I am going to just stop commenting on bitcoin issues almost entirely and focus on ethereum tech. I think the community needs to go through *a lot* of healing, and the firebrands on all sides that are *so sure* that their side is righteous and the other evil deeply worry me.”
Vitalik Buterin
Official Twitter account – November 14, 2017
Ok, I am going to just stop commenting on bitcoin issues almost entirely and focus on ethereum tech.
I think the community needs to go through *a lot* of healing, and the firebrands on all sides that are *so sure* that their side is righteous and the other evil deeply worry me.3,3346:16 – Nov 14, 2017Twitter Ads info and privacy971 people are talking about this
“So I just misspelled the name of someone named Jason as “Json”.”
Vitalik Buterin (developer humor)
Official Twitter account – July 25, 2017
So I just misspelled the name of someone named Jason as “Json”.1,1524:54 – Jul 26, 2017Twitter Ads info and privacy237 people are talking about this
“Instead of the scripting language simply being a way of describing the terms of relationships between two parties, contracts were themselves full-fledged accounts, and had the ability to hold, send and receive assets, and even maintain permanent storage.”
Vitalik Buterin
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