Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer. Vitalik has been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, co-founding and writing articles for Bitcoin Magazine. But he is mostly known as the boy genius behind Ethereum, the world's second most valued and recognized cryptocurrency platform after Bitcoin. At the time of writing this article, his visionary project has a huge market cap of more than $26 billion and bills itself as the second largest cryptocurrency in the market. Meanwhile, Vitalik is only 25 years old and has far-reaching plans for his creation.
Vitalik was born on January 31, 1994 in a city of Kolomna, Moscow province, Russia. He lived in Russia until he was 6 years old, when his parents decided to emigrate to Canada in search of better employment opportunities.
When he was in the third grade of a Canadian elementary school, he was placed in a gifted program. And, while getting a spot on this program meant more learning opportunities, he was basically abruptly separated from his friends. While on the show, Vitalik quickly realized that his particular abilities and talents made him somewhat strange to his peers and even his teachers. He was naturally predisposed to mathematics and programming, possessed a strong early interest in economics, and could add three-digit numbers in his head twice as fast as the average human his age.
Buterin was a stranger to social gatherings and extracurricular events. As he recalls, many people talked about him as if he were some kind of math genius. At that point, Vitalik began to wonder why he couldn't just be a normal person with a 75 percent average like everyone else.
Some will say that Vitalik had a hard time getting used to a new country and culture, with his strange mind and incredible talents further setting him apart from his peers. As a result of this situation, he became deeply immersed in the learning process, as well as on the Internet, where he forged most of his professional and personal relationships.
He then spent four years at the Aberald School, a private secondary school in Toronto. Vitalik describes his stay there as one of the most interesting and productive years of his life. The school changed his perception of education, and both his attitude and his results changed dramatically almost immediately after he began studying there. It was in Aberald that he developed his characteristic thirst for learning, essentially making learning his main goal in life.
Vitalik has always had good grades, but for a while his priority was earning extra levels by playing World of Warcraft, rather than putting time and effort into his homework. He was happily playing WoW since he was 13 years old, until one day in 2010, Vitalik's character had some properties changed due to a Blizzard update. That night he cried himself to sleep, realizing how horrible centralized services can be and gave up on World of Warcraft altogether.
It could be said that it was his search for a new passion in life that led Vitalik to the world of cryptocurrencies. He first heard about Bitcoin from his father, who had already launched a piece of software in 2013. He didn't jump right in. Furthermore, he at first thought that cryptocurrency was inevitably going to fail, since it has no intrinsic value. However, he later found out a few more things about it and began to develop an interest. As he himself said, if you hear about something twice, it would be a good idea to invest some time and find out more.
Already at that time, Vitalik viewed anything he had to do with government regulation or corporate control as simply evil. As was obvious, the decentralized and uncontrollable nature of Bitcoin caught his interest. Although his politics of good and evil have been substantially updated since then, Vitalik remains motivated by his belief that the powerful have too much power in their hands.
Buterin ended up spending his time on various Bitcoin-related forums, researching the network. At first, what caught his attention was purely the cryptocurrency element of the network, but as he became more and more involved in the community, he began to realize the virtually limitless potential of the technology behind Bitcoin.
He wanted to formally join this new experimental economy by getting his hands on some tokens, but he had neither the computing power to mine them nor the money to buy Bitcoin. So he searched for paid Bitcoin work on various forums and eventually started writing articles for a blog, which earned him about five Bitcoin per article.
Through his forum work and his articles, Vitalik strove to gain a greater understanding and experience of Bitcoin, as well as greater exposure in the community. At the same time, he was researching all the different economic, technological, and political aspects of cryptocurrency. His articles caught the attention of Mihai Alisie, a Romanian-based Bitcoin enthusiast, which led the two of them, in late 2011, to co-found Bitcoin Magazine. Buterin took the job as editor-in-chief for the magazine while doing another part-time job as a research assistant for cryptographer Ian Goldberg. Furthermore, Vitalik was taking five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo at the same time.
In May 2013, he traveled to San Jose, California to attend a Bitcoin-related conference as a representative of Bitcoin Magazine. It was the first time Buterin witnessed that the community that was popping up around cryptocurrency was alive and well, which convinced him that this is a project truly worth getting into. Later that year, Vitalik dropped out of university and spent some of the Bitcoin he had accumulated to travel around the world and meet the people who were trying to expand the capabilities of the Bitcoin network into a bigger, more capable version of itself. same.
During his travels, he saw many Bitcoin-related projects, from small shops in New Hampshire and restaurants in Berlin that accept Bitcoin, to Bitcoin ATMs and various small communities around the world. However, all of them remained primarily focused on how to improve and promote Bitcoin's role as money.
In October 2013, he visited Israel, where he met the people behind the 'CovertCoins' and 'MasterCoin' projects. Those projects were exploring the use of Blockchain for other applications, for example issuing tokens on top of Bitcoin, allowing users to use financial contracts, etc. Even though they were still using the base Bitcoin Blockchain, they were assigning new properties to Bitcoin transactions.
After seeing the protocols those projects were using, Vitalik realized that it is possible to massively generalize what the protocols were doing by replacing all of their functionality with a Turing-complete programming language. In computing, a Turing-complete programming language is something that allows a computer to solve any particular problem, given the appropriate algorithm and the necessary amounts of time and memory. Initially, he pitched his idea to existing projects, but everyone told him that although it was an interesting idea, the time was not yet right to execute such big things. So he decided to do it himself.
At the end of 2013, Vitalik Buterin described his idea in a White Paper, which he sent to some of his friends, who in turn sent it further. As a result, some 30 people contacted Vitalik to discuss the concept. He was expecting criticism and people pointing out critical errors in the concept, but no such thing ever happened.
Already then, the concept of Ethereum had a lot to do with the currency. The idea changed and was formed over time, during meetings and discussions with people who were in total agreement with the idea. Once they understood the programming language, they came up with new ways to use it every week. As of late January 2014, the team realized that it was relatively easy to create decentralized file storage, and concepts like name logging could be realized with just a couple of lines of code. As those use cases piled up, they slowly changed the idea of Vitalik and gradually shaped it into what Ethereum is today.
The project was publicly announced in January 2014, with the core team consisting of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Joe Lubin, and Gavin Wood. Buterin also introduced Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami, and a few months later the team decided to hold a wholesale sale of Ether, the network's native token, to fund development. Around the same time, Vitalik himself was awarded the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship.
Through the public sale, during which Ether was sold for Bitcoins, the team raised more than 31,000 BTC from the cryptocurrency community, amounting to about $18 million at the time. However, at the time of collection, a Bitcoin was trading around $650, but soon after its price plummeted, and the team was left to face a loss of millions of dollars. However, with the money raised, the Ethereum team established the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Switzerland, which was tasked with overseeing the development of Ethereum's open source software.
Despite some difficulties, the Ethereum crowdfunding campaign turned out to be one of the most successful to date, garnering coverage of the platform in many major financial publications, including The Wall Street Journal.
Prior to the official launch of the network, the Foundation developed and tested several codename prototypes of the Ethereum platform. A version called Olympic was the last of those prototypes, as well as a pre-release of the public beta. Many early adopters searched for system bugs, as the Ethereum team decided to introduce a 25,000 Ether “bug bounty” for stress testing the network.
On July 30, 2015, the first publicly available version of Ethereum called Frontier was released. It was still a test release as it came in a basic format with just a command line, allowing developers to test the environment live by building decentralized applications. Once the platform was deemed stable enough by both developers and auditors, it was migrated to a Homestead version.
The migration happened on March 14, 2016, when the Ethereum network saw its first official production launch. Its arrival began to demonstrate the next generation of Blockchain technology, gave developers more freedom, and was significantly easier to use. There were also numerous technological improvements that occurred behind the scenes.
By this time, Ethereum has already made a strong introduction of itself into the cryptocurrency market. A large number of major cryptocurrency exchanges started trading Ether, which in turn saw a rapid rise in valuation. Despite this being a first production release, massive companies like Microsoft and IBM have already been doing projects on the Ethereum platform, as well as directly approaching Vitalik and his team for collaboration.
The next big update is preparing to move from Proof-to-Work or Proof of Work to a Proof-of-Stake or Proof of Participation. Said change will come with the Constantinople and St. Petersburg updates. Likewise, work is being done on a 2.0 network that allows greater scalability within the Ethereum network. According to Joseph Lubin, Vitalik's partner, this new update will increase its scalability by about 1000 times.