It is difficult to find a more discussed personality in the world of blockchain now than Vitalik Buterin. Vitaly Dmitrievich is only 24 years old, and he prefers to call himself Vitalik (this is how his name is written in his Canadian passport). But the press and the cryptocurrency community gave him several different titles - “crypto god”, “king of Ethereum”.
In 2022, which many consider the year of the heyday of cryptocurrencies, Vitalik moved to Singapore. He was called both “the main Russian entrepreneur” - lenta.ru and “professional of the year” - Vedomosti. And Forbes and Fortune magazines included him in their ratings of “The 600 Brightest People Under 30” and “The 40 Most Influential Young People Under 40.”
Who is Vitalik Buterin?
Biography of Vitaly Buterin: from birth to Bitcoin
Vitalik was born in the Moscow region in the city of Kolomna on January 31, 1994. His parents Dmitry and Natalya were at that time students at one of the Moscow universities and were studying to become computer specialists.
Vitaly Buterin, future inventor of Ethereum
They instilled in their son a love of mathematics and computers from an early age. Vitalik got his first computer when he was 4 years old. The boy used it not for games, but for calculations. My favorite pastime was writing macros for Excel, which resulted in the creation at the age of seven of a fairy-tale world of rabbits controlled by formulas and instant calculations.
All this has already happened in the Canadian city of Toronto, where Vitalik’s parents brought him at the age of 5. At school he showed his mathematical talent. For example, in the third grade, he quickly mentally performed operations with three-digit numbers and knew the number “pi” to 20 decimal places and was transferred to a class for gifted children.
At the age of 10, Vitalik began programming in C++. Since it was during this period of his life that his passion for games began, in particular World of Warcraft, the schoolboy’s first creations were games.
And although after graduating from Aberald High School, Buterin criticized the education system, he called the four years spent in this educational institution “the most productive years of his life” because it was here that he was taught to think, reason and learn.
In 2012, Vitalik entered the University of Waterloo, where he studies programming. At the age of 17, he won a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Around the same time, he first heard about Bitcoin from his own father.
How it all began
In 2011, Buterin learned about Bitcoin. However, at the very beginning, his opinion about cryptocurrency was not the most positive. The programmer did not understand how intangible money could have intrinsic value.
However, his skepticism did not last long; Buterin soon became interested in the idea of a renewed economic system.
The guy often participated in forums, understood the working mechanisms of crypto projects, and wrote analytical articles.
Buterin’s articles were noticed by a developer from Romania, Mikhail Alisi, who invited the guy to create a magazine about cryptocurrencies, Biitcoin Magazine, with him. Most of the articles were written by Vitalik himself - more than 400 articles.
Vitalik entered the University of Waterloo, but left after his first year to study blockchain technology.
The father was not happy about this and asked the guy to finish his studies and get a diploma. However, Buterin refused and continued to act in his own way.
In 2013, Buterin went abroad, where he communicated with like-minded people, studied the possibilities of implementing blockchain technology, and also became interested in developing software products.
During his journey, he realized how limited Bitcoin is. Then the programmer began to think about the idea of creating a universal cryptocurrency platform.
After the trip, returning to Toronto, Vitalik began writing a white paper, a document in which the programmer spoke about the concept of an online platform with the ability to create smart contracts, which he called Ethereum.
He shared his idea with friends, who spread it among their acquaintances. After some time, about 20 people expressed their desire to take part in the project.
The team included technical specialists Gavin Wood and Mikhail Alisi , decentralized development expert Anthony Di Iorio, and mathematician Charles Hiskinson.
Money for the project was raised through crowdfunding.
In addition, Buterin was awarded the Thiel Prize in the amount of $100 thousand, which is given to young people for the implementation of innovative ideas.
In 2014, at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, a young developer presented his Ethereum project to participants. The launch of the project took place in the summer of next year.
The programmer worked not only on Ethereum, he also participated in the development of other ideas, such as, for example, the Kryptokit wallet.
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From Bitcoin to Ethereum
At first, the future creator of the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization was skeptical about the idea of Bitcoin as money. But his deeper acquaintance with the blockchain led Vitalik to become imbued with the revolutionary ideas of the organization that lie at the heart of the blockchain.
An attempt to understand this world led Vitaly to specialized forums and chats. Over time, he became an author of articles for websites about Bitcoin. They also paid for his services in this currency, and Buterin spent the first 8.5 bitcoins he earned on... a T-shirt.
Such activities led to Vitaly having many acquaintances who were also interested in blockchain. One of them, a programmer from Romania Mihai Alisi, proposed creating a thematic magazine “Bitcoin Magazine”. More than four hundred articles were created by Buterin for this publication.
The initial passion for Bitcoin grew into serious interest within a year. And to such an extent that Vitalik dropped out of university after the first year and decided to travel around the world to meet enthusiasts like him. Of course, my father did not like this decision; he insisted on the need to get a higher education and a prestigious job, and only then engage in such projects. But Buterin Jr. insisted on his own.
The main result of the journey was an understanding of the limitations of the Bitcoin code and the desire to create something better. Vitaly's main idea was to use a code (based on a scenario or script approach) that could theoretically solve possible problems with calculations. This is how he came up with the idea of creating the Ethereum blockchain platform.
Returning to Canada, Buterin compiled all his ideas in the form of a White Paper and sent it to his friends, who then did the same. As a result, a group of people interested in this project formed, who wanted to develop the potential inherent in Bitcoin.
In 2014, the idea of Ethereum was awarded the World Technology Award and a $100,000 grant from the Peter Thiel Foundation was allocated for its development.
Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin, two founders of Ethereum
In the same year, the company Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse) was registered in Switzerland, besides Vitalik Buterin, among its creators were: Mihai Alisi, Anthony DiIorio and Charles Hiskinson. Then they were joined by Amir Chetrit and Gavin Wood. It was Wood who created the Ethereum software base and reworked the White Paper, devoting his entire Christmas holiday to this.
In July 2015, the Ethereum platform was launched.
The founder of the Ether cryptocurrency is from Kolomna
Vitalik was born on January 31, 1994 in Kolomna (Moscow region) in the family of entrepreneur and programmer Dmitry Buterin and financial analyst Natalya Amelina. The family moved to Canada when Vitalik was six years old.
Since childhood, Vitalik’s father encouraged Vitalik’s interest in programming and creating video games, and he also told him about Bitcoin. He introduced his son to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
One of the first part-time jobs of the future creator of Ether was articles in a thematic blog. Vitalik was paid in cryptocurrency for his texts.
“I didn’t have a powerful computer to mine bitcoins normally, I didn’t have money to buy them, but I liked the idea, I read a lot about cryptocurrency on forums, I started doing some work to earn bitcoins,” Vitalik said in RBC interview.
In November 2011, Vitalik became the co-founder and editor of Bitcoin Magazine. In May 2012, the first printed issue was published; a Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol of the hacker group Anonymous, was placed on the cover. The magazine became the first major print publication on the topic of blockchain.
In 2015, Buterin joined the editorial board of the first peer-reviewed scientific journal, Ledger, which is also dedicated to cryptocurrencies.
From programmer to "guru"
In the first couple of months, the founders of Ethereum ran out of money, and they actually went to ICO - they sold ether for bitcoins. The initial rate was only 30 cents per token. But 42 days of sales brought in almost $19 million.
It is important to note that the release of cryptocurrency was not the goal of the creators of Ethereum. They defined it primarily as “software accessible to everyone, protected from unauthorized access,” that is, as a platform for decentralized applications and smart contracts that anyone can use. But the secondary importance of Ethereum’s financial indicators for its founders did not prevent Vitalik from entering the top 20 people who became rich on the blockchain. Forbes estimates his fortune at $500 million.
From this period, Vitaly Buterin’s activities were not limited to work on the development of Ethereum; a large number of meetings, conferences and interviews appeared in his schedule.
In 2022, at the economic forum in St. Petersburg, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and part of it took place behind closed doors. A month after it, the creation of a joint project “Masterchain” between Vnesheconombank and Ethereum was announced.
The head of Sberbank, German Gref, described Vitalik’s level as follows:
When Buterin talks about blockchain, Stanford professors take out their pens and notepads and start taking notes.
Now Vitalik Buterin is one of the few well-known representatives of the blockchain world who is very cautious about the prospects for the cryptocurrency market. For example, in February of this year, he wrote on his Twitter that this is a very hyper-volatile area and it may well drop to zero. So in June 2022, the rate of the ether itself fell by 15% only because of rumors that Vitalik died in an accident.
Ethereum Basics
When I came up with Ethereum, my first initial thought was, “Come on, this is too good to be true.”
The Ethereum blockchain cryptocurrency is called Ether; it is abbreviated to the ticker ETH, also represented by the Greek capital symbol Xi (Ξ). Like its inspiration, Bitcoin, Ethereum is a distributed public network on the blockchain. Ether obtained from mining is traded as a cryptocurrency and is used to pay transaction fees and services on the Ethereum network.
The Ethereum mafia at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Vitalik Buterin himself explained this at Disrupt SF 2022:
“You basically need some kind of system that tracks how much money you have at any given time, how much money you are allowed to spend. You can do this very easily with centralized servers, but if you want to do it decentralized, it's actually a very difficult problem to solve."
Most importantly, blockchain focuses on running the program code of any decentralized application. While BTC is limited to the currency use case, Ethereum "replaces the more limited bitcoin language... with a language that allows developers to write their own programs."
Ethereum allows developers to create their own smart contracts using the Solidity programming language. Smart contracts on the Ethereum distributed network can have several purposes, including:
- Functioning as "multi-signature" accounts so that funds are only spent when a certain percentage of participants agree
- Multiple agreements between users
- Provide benefits to other contracts
- Used to store application information.
Smart contracts have limitations: they are only as good as the people who write them. However, with correct forecasting, negative effects can be reversed.
Buterin also developed Ethereum to create DAOs. It is a completely autonomous, decentralized organization without a leader. DAOs are governed by a number of smart contracts.
In a Q&A session about plans, Ethreum responded with the following:
1. Find sources of income other than existing Ether reserves (no worries, we still have about 11 million worth of ETH in addition to our reserves). 2. Expanding the research group and finding more of the right people to participate in development in all areas (scalability, privacy, security, etc.) 3. Improving the external relations of the foundation; working to help the community understand what the foundation does, why things are done the way they are, how they work, and what progress is being made.
He also spoke about the work schedule in Ethereum:
- I'm thinking about PoS
- I write code
- I'm talking to other researchers on the team,
- I read a little about everything: mathematics, cryptography, economics, blockchain developments,
- I eat, sleep, etc.
Charity
Vitalik Buterin is a philanthropist; he has donated huge sums more than once. Below are the largest donations. Perhaps this is only a small part that he himself wrote about.
- $2.4 million for the SENS Research Foundation for anti-aging research;
- $763,000 to prevent the rise of the machines;
- $1 million. Vitalik and OmiseGO donated OMG tokens to refugees from Africa;
- Buterin donated 100 ETH (~$95,000 at the time of transfer) to the non-profit organization Internet Archive.
Net worth of Buterin, founder of Ethereum
According to Forbes, Vitalik Buterin's net worth ranges from 400 to 500 million US dollars, including digital currencies (with Ethereum capitalization at $81 billion) and shares of various companies.
If we take into account that the capitalization of ETH is currently 2 times less than it was in Forbes calculations, and discard the conditions that Vitaly could earn in a few months and record profits in dollars, then roughly speaking, as of April 2022, Buterin’s fortune is about $200 million .
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Vitaly Buterin about the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies:
About Ethereum
For me it has never been a question of money, it is primarily an idea
About the prospects of blockchain
The first of them is, of course, financial, the next ones are Internet security, logistics and everything related to the reliable storage of information.
About ICO
No more than 10% of them will survive. The main problems of ICOs are the lack of benefit from a large number of tokens with a great desire to simply get a lot of money and people’s inattention to the teams that promote certain ICO ideas.
About the main paradox of the blockchain
Its main goal is security, but because it is a new technology, it has a lot of security problems.
About Russia
Everyone is discussing blockchain here, from students and businessmen to officials. Nowhere else in the world is there such a desire to implement this technology.
Last news
Previously, there was quite a lot of news in which Buterin became the hero. By April 1, he published the news on his Twitter that the emission of the Ethereum cryptocurrency would be limited to 120 million tokens.
However, it later turned out that this was just an April Fool's joke.
Another news from Buterin that he will comment on the Deconomy 2022 economic forum shocked the Internet a couple of days ago.
During the conference, he managed to write a lot about the speeches of various developers, and also managed to quarrel with Craig Wright, who spoke at the presentation of Bitcoin Cash.
After all of Buterin’s messages reached Wright, he did not stand aside and responded to him in the same, rather militant, spirit.
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Rumors and fakes
Since 2022, when the Ethereum platform reached the peak of its popularity, Vitalik has continued his journey around the world. After living in Switzerland for three years, he went to Singapore, where he still lives. Like any famous person, Buterin does not lead a secluded life - he actively gives interviews to the press and sometimes attends various events.
What is Vitalik's illness?
However, the manner and specificity of communication gave rise to the spread of rumors about a possible neurological disease of the young millionaire. And therefore, a rather pressing question on the Internet at one time was the question of Buterin’s health.
Indeed, Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin, despite his versatility, remains a man of mystery with his own peculiarities in his manner of speech and excessive gestures. But we can safely assure you that he is absolutely healthy. He is also a supporter of a healthy lifestyle that does not allow smoking and drinking alcohol.
Childhood
At the age of four, Vitalik received a computer as a gift, and at the age of seven he had already created his first virtual system. It was a fairy-tale corner where rabbits lived. Their existence was regulated by graphs, mathematical formulas and equations, which the owner of the virtual world instantly solved without any auxiliary means.
In 2004, Vitalik mastered the C++ programming language and began writing computer games. The most famous of them, Tutoria, has become a stumbling block for avid gamers; only one player in the world, not counting the author himself, managed to complete all levels in it.
After graduating from high school, Buterin entered The Abelard School, one of the best private pre-university training centers in Toronto. As Vitalik Buterin himself would later say: “It was there that they taught me to think and develop.”
Hard fork and Ethereum Classic
In addition to decentralized Dapps, Ethereum allows users to create DAOs - decentralized autonomous organizations. They are tied to digital assets and operate on the basis of predetermined rules - smart contracts. Users of such organizations who have purchased tokens act as shareholders and decide how to spend the company's money.
One such organization—founded by German startup Slock.it—was the victim of the largest hack in the platform’s history. The hacker managed to steal $50 million out of the $150 million raised by the company through its ICO. Although the cybercriminal exploited a bug in the company's own code, Ethereum was under attack.
The Ethereum rate fell from $20 to $13, and the platform’s management was faced with a choice: roll back the network until the appearance of the DAO (soft fork) or split the network in two and partially change the rules of its functioning (hard fork). As a result, the community voted for the second option. This is how Ethereum Classic appeared, which, with minor exceptions, duplicated the original. Buterin then stated that a double blockchain could confuse investors and users and reduce the security of the entire system.
First steps in the crypto industry
It was Vitalik’s father who first told Vitalik about distributed ledger technology. At first, Buterin Jr. was skeptical about the system of mutual settlements with digital money in a peer-to-peer network, but after familiarizing himself in detail with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and other virtual coins, Vitalik was inspired by the idea and subsequently became one of the adherents of the crypto industry.
After studying the available material, he began to independently write analytical articles on the topic of blockchain technologies. He was noticed by the Romanian programmer Mihai, and invited Buterin to become a co-founder of the specialized Bitcoin Magazine.
