Vitalik Buterin is one of the most important people in crypto. Learn more about his life in our biography “Who Is Vitalik Buterin?” COVERED Early Life Bitcoin Magazine The Idea of Ethereum Launching Ethereum Buterin As The Face of Ethereum EARLY LIFE Vitalik Buterin conceptualized the idea of Ethereum as a teenager. He is one […] The post Who Is Vitalik Buterin? appeared first on CryptosRus.

Who Is Vitalik Buterin?

Vitalik Buterin is one of the most important people in crypto. Learn more about his life in our biography “Who Is Vitalik Buterin?”

COVERED

  • Early Life
  • Bitcoin Magazine
  • The Idea of Ethereum
  • Launching Ethereum
  • Buterin As The Face of Ethereum

EARLY LIFE

Vitalik Buterin conceptualized the idea of Ethereum as a teenager. He is one of a handful of people who have been instrumental in taking the crypto industry from a niche forum to the mainstream. He was born in a small town near Moscow in 1994 to two computer scientists Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Ameline. Like his parents, he always had an interest in numbers and computers. His father Dmitry Buterin took the family to Canada in 2000 in search of better job prospects. Buterin was six at the time.

It was his natural inclination towards mathematics and programming that always made him stand out from the crowd. At the age of four, he inherited his parents’ old IBM computer as Time reported, and began to play with MS Excel. By the time he was seven, he could recite more than a hundred digits of Pi and would shout out maths equations to pass the time. By the age of 12, he began to code. Today he is fluent in almost six languages and disciplines like Advanced Calculus, Sociological theory, and Land-tax-history.

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BITCOIN MAGAZINE

Vitalik Buterin first learned about Bitcoin from his father. At that time he didn’t pay much attention to it. However, later on, he became interested in the blockchain after a bad experience with “World of Warcraft” game developers. It was a trauma in which the game developers weakened his favorite character.

At that time he realized the horrors that centralized services could bring. He was taken by the idea of a decentralized platform not controlled by any one entity. “I saw everything to do with either government regulations or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw thousands of people over, this time”

This time when he came across Bitcoin, he also came across the idea of a decentralized currency which he called “a dualistic worldview”. He started profound research on Bitcoin thereby becoming a contributing author on Bitcoin blogs.

His articles attracted Mihai Alisie, a Romanian Bitcoin enthusiast, who began an online correspondence with Buterin. This would later lead to the creation of Ethereum. In late 2011, Vitalik and Mihai co-founded “Bitcoin Magazine” which was the first publication focusing solely on the crypto industry.

THE IDEA OF ETHEREUM

In May 2013, Buterin attended a Bitcoin conference in San Jose, California. He was there as a representative of Bitcoin Magazine. He observed that there’s a huge number of people that flocked around the same idea of ‘Decentralization’. It was enough to push him deeper into conceptualizing a decentralized platform in the crypto industry. A platform that could become the host for all blockchain-based projects, similar to how the internet is a host for all websites. Following his passion, he went out to study Computer Science at the University of Waterloo but dropped out of college to focus full time on building his platform.

He began to write the Ethereum white paper and started traveling around the world to meet with other like-minded individuals. As it turned out, he belonged to a group of people who observed that Bitcoin’s underlying technology could be useful for much more than recording transactions. Buterin wanted to create a new and improved version of Bitcoin that allowed more scalability and applications through an ambitious vision to re-architect the web.

LAUNCHING ETHEREUM

Buterin sketched out a whitepaper for his proposed network which he named Ethereum, in November 2013 and sent it to 15 of his friends.

‘When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this thing is too good to be true, and I’m going to have five professional cryptographers raining down on me and telling me how stupid I am for not seeing a bunch of very obvious flaws’ (Buterin’s interview to Wired) He further added, “Two weeks later, I was extremely surprised that none of that happened. As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good, fundamentally completely sound”

Within a span of two weeks, 30 people reached out to him to talk about the idea.  Some prominent names include Antony Di Lorio, an entrepreneur, Stephan Tual, a crypto enthusiast, Joseph Lubin, an early Bitcoin investor, Gavin Wood, a programmer, and Charles Hoskinson were among the first to gather around Ethereum.

Buterin first revealed Ethereum to the public at the 2014 Bitcoin Miami Conference where his speech was given a standing ovation. However, building a project as big and ambitious as Ethereum would require a lot of money. In order to avoid attracting the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the founders of Ethereum decided to hold an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The crowd sale of Ether tokens raised more than 31,000 bitcoins, approximately $18 million in worth at that time. Despite skepticism, Buterin launched Ethereum to great success. It’s now firmly entrenched as number 2 to Bitcoin on the global charts. In addition, Ethereum is now the foundation for NFTs, DeFi, and play-to-earn gaming — which are not currently possible with Bitcoin.

BUTERIN AS THE FACE OF ETHEREUM

Buterin’s face and name are intrinsically woven into Ethereum. Following a dispute with other Ethereum founders, he said, “I realized I was the one who had the ability to make a decision and that a lot of this is actually on me” It can also be observed through the instance that once a post read, “Vitalik Buterin confirmed dead. Insiders unloading ETH”, even though this post was a fake, but Ether’s price tanked by more than 23% in a matter of minutes.

Similarly, many of the initial co-founders of Ethereum, whom Buterin likened to ‘Fellowship of The Ring’ have since moved on. Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson have created their own rival blockchain networks that aim to replace Ethereum as the top dog. In late 2018, Buterin supported the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). Now one of the pillars of a burgeoning industry, it is hard to imagine what the crypto space would be like if it weren’t for Vitalik Buterin.

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