Vitalik Buterin

Who is Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer. He was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia on the 31st of January, 1994 (24 years old) to Natalia Ameline and Dmitry Buterin who was a computer scientist. Vitalik lived in this Russian area until the age of six in 2000, when his parents emigrated to Canada for greener pastures and better employment opportunities.

Vitalik Buterin, born in 1994 in Russia. Nationality: Russian-Canadian

As early as the age of six, in Canada, Vitalik started demonstrating traits of a genius, and for this reason, he was placed in a class for the gifted while in grade three of elementary school. Just like most geniuses, Vitalik realized that his skill set made him a person of interest to his friends and even teachers. So, he was naturally given to programming and maths, and he as well had a keen interest in economics, and he could add up numbers in his head faster than other of his peers. He attended a private high school called Abelard School in Toronto for four whole years. And according to Vitalik, those high school years ‘proved to be among the most exciting and productive years of my life; the intimate connection between students and teachers and the level of depth at which the material was taught, made me want to learn and focus on learning as a primary goal’.

Vitalik also wrote that even though he was ‘never particularly inspired by the traditional education system when subjects are taught with dedication and focus on intellectual inquiry’. He said, " I noticed my attitude and resulted almost immediately and drastically change. Education is ultimately much more than simply memorizing individual facts, or even learning individual concepts. What matters most is learning how to think, learning how to reason and learning how to learn".

Vitalik's father- Dmitry Buterin said that his son started playing with Excel Spreadsheets at the very young age of four and at the age of ten, he could code in C++, he also participated and came out third place in a high school programming competition in late 2011. Vitalik had excellent grades, but there was a time when his main concern was in gaining extra levels playing World of Warcraft which he played from the age of 13 to the age of 16 when some properties of his character changed due to a Blizzard update. After the Blizzard update, he quitted World of Warcraft, and he realized how demoralizing centralized services could be. He attended the University of Waterloo, but he dropped out in 2014.

Vitalik's main interests include algorithms, social science, maths, mechanism design, politics, economics, and rationalist philosophy. Also said by Vitalik was that " he loves pointing out the similarities between governance challenges of apolitical crypto projects and the eternal stupidity that is mainstream geopolitics" and the intersection between all of his interests.

What do you know about Vitalik Buterin's Writing Career

Vitalik's incredible talents and outstanding mind made him a subject of focus in his new environment, and since he was set apart from his peers, he had time to forge relationships. He, however, dived deeper into learning and surfing the Internet wherein he forged most of his personal and professional relationships.

After his experience with World of Warcraft in 2010, he discovered Bitcoin in 2011 through his father and initially, he was sceptical about it because he felt that it could have no intrinsic value without substantial backing. After a while, he continued to hear about it, and this led him to develop more interest in it as he said that it might be wise to invest time in learning more about something you hear about more than once.

During the period of his learning of Bitcoin, he regarded everything relating to government regulation and centralized systems as evil based on his previous experience. He then met a person on a chat forum for bitcoin who was trying to start a bitcoin blog. Buterin wrote for this site for a payment of five bitcoin (approximately $ 3.50) and his first ever topic at age 17 was "Bitcoin for teenagers", but soon after, the website collapsed because of lack of attention on Bitcoin at that time.

After a while, he started writing for a blog named 'Bitcoin Weekly' for an hourly wage of $1.5. Another person reached out to him in September 2011 about a new Bitcoin-related publication named 'Bitcoin Magazine', he accepted the position as not only a lead writer but also as a co-founder with Mihai Alisie who lived at Romania at the time.

In 2012, this magazine began publishing a print edition, and it was mailed to subscribers all over the world. It was on for sale at bookstores, Barnes & Noble and published online, in 2012. The magazine sold for $9 per month, but so many of its articles could be read for free online. Not surprisingly, it has been referred to as the first serious cryptocurrency based publication. BTC Media, a publishing, and media subsidiary of BTC Inc. later purchased this magazine in 2014 from Coin Publishing LLC.

Vitalik Buterin wrote a total of 260 articles for Bitcoin Magazine from February 2012 to July 2014, writing an average of nine articles a month. In his first writings, Vitalik focused on explaining the basics of Bitcoin; mining pools, wallets and an overall introduction to Bitcoin before he started writing about current events. One of the Bitcoin events covered by Vitalik was the heist of 43, 000 BTC ($150 M) in March 2012 and the Mt. GOX (a Bitcoin exchange platform) heist. He wrote about these heist from different angles, covering the heist's details, the community reactions to the heist.

In June 2012, he covered the 'Great Bubble of 2011' where Bitcoin went up from sub-dollar prices to $31.91 before eventually collapsing below $7. He also wrote about Silk Road which was one of the most significant operations in the community of Bitcoin in 2012 and the arrest of Dread Pirate Roberts which led to the shutting down of Silk Road. In 2013, he wrote more about and covered crises in varieties of communities in the space of cryptocurrency like Iran, Cyprus, and Argentina. He stopped writing for Bitcoin Magazine in 2014.

How the idea of Ethereum was generated

Ethereum Whitepaper

Team of Ethereum

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

The project initiated by Vitalik Buterin became so popular that several start-ups operating on blockchain technology, Fortune 500 companies and research groups created the Enterprise Ethereum Enterprise which was announced on March 2017 with thirty founding members. By the start of May 2017, this non-profit organization had new enterprise members which consists of up to 116 companies. Some of these establishments are

CME Group
ConsenSys
Toyota Research Institute
Cornell’s University research group
Intel
Microsoft
Banco Santander
Samsung SDS
Cooley LLP
Deloitte
National Bank of Canada
J.P Morgan
Accenture
BNY Mellon
Merck KGaA.

There were new joined members by July such as MasterCard, Scotiabank and Cisco Systems making a total of 150 alliance members.

Other Open Source Software

Vitalik has contributed in a developer capacity to some other projects based on open source software like pybitcointools, Kryptokit, multisig.info, and btckeysplit. He also contributed to some other projects like Cody Wilson's DarkWallet, Bitcoin Python libraries and Egora (a site that functions as a cryptocurrency marketplace ).

Awards, Recognitions and Philanthropical acts of Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship Award of $100,000 in 2014 after he dropped out of University to travel, research more on Bitcoin and associate with people that were visionaries of cryptocurrency. Consequently, in the same year, he received the World Technology Award in the IT Software Category. He has been recognized as Fortune 40 under 40 list in 2016 and Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018. Vitalik met with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin on the 2nd of June, 2017 and he fully discussed the blockchain technology and its advantages with the President. He has donated Ether worth a million dollars in collaboration with an open payment platform based on Ethereum called OmiseGO to the GiveDirectly organization which focuses on giving aids to the extremely poor refugees in Africa. In 2018, he also donated Ether of $2.4 million to the SENS Research Foundation to facilitate the research on rejuvenation biotechnologies and human life extension.

Death Hoax

On the 26th of June, 2017 a death hoax originated about Vitalik Buterin on the 4chan internet forum. There were posts stating that Buterin had died in a car crash and the story was carried by VioNews, an online news site. Buterin immediately had to resort to posting an ethereum block number and hash on social media to prove that he was indeed alive. Even though this rumour was cut down immediately, it still had an impact on the Ethereum market with the price of ether dropping below $300.

Vitalik's Net Worth

The net worth of Vitalik's visionary project (Ethereum coin) skyrocketed to a market cap of close to $30 billion in 2018 from $1 billion in 2017 when he was placed on Fortune 40 under 40 list. This market cap is almost as high as the private valuations achievements of Snap chat and Airbnb. The personal net worth of Vitalik Buttering is estimated to be around $400 million and $500 million.