Who Is Vitalik Buterin?
The blockchain industry is filled with a great number of individuals who are deemed to be geniuses. Be it blockchain creators, exchange owners, community founders, or masters of the art of trading, all of them share one unique experience - they are idolized to the point of godhood.
One such figure is Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian developer who co-founded Ethereum. He is thought to be the next most influential blockchain creator after Satoshi Nakamoto, helping create the second biggest crypto ecosystem and an important layer of blockchain technology through smart contracts.
The question is, who is this elusive figure and how did he event Ethereum? Vitalik Buterin might be an odd individual who is often poked fun at, but we can all agree that many fail to wrap their head around Buterin’s brilliant ideas.
Humble beginnings
Although born in Russia in 1994, Vitalik Buterin lived most of his life in Canada, where his family has decided to emigrate to in search of better working conditions. Even at a young age, he was recognized for his academic skills and knowledge of subjects like mathematics and programming. Soon enough, he was moved to a program for gifted children.
Like any other extremely intelligent individual, Buterin too suffered from poor social skills, which forced him to become introverted and spend his time playing video games.
As a matter of fact, games were a turning point for Buterin’s belief in authority and centralization. In his own biography, the avid World of Warcraft player explained how he came to the realization that the future is decentralized:
“I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day, I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.”
First encounter with crypto
Vitalik Buterin discovered the world of cryptocurrencies during his years as a student. The story begins in 2011 when he found out about Bitcoin, and surprisingly enough, he did not believe that it has a future. Since it had value without physical backing, the young genius became skeptical regarding the purpose and design of blockchain-powered digital assets.
An iconic image of Vitalik Buterin
However, endless waves of curiosity drove Buterin to conclude that Bitcoin is much more than what he has initially believed. He decided to create a blog called Bitcoin Weekly at the time, and soon after, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie - another enthusiast who he met on a Bitcoin forum.
Buterin’s hobby soon became his life’s work, and after realizing that crypto-related projects take too much of his productive time, he decided to drop out in 2013 and pursue a career in the blockchain industry full-time.
Ethereum’s co-founder spent the next few years attending crypto conferences, traveling the world, meeting up with other developers, and finding new ways of ending the world’s centralized hierarchy. After talking with the teams of CovertCoins and MasterCoin, two projects who issued tokens on top of Bitcoin, Buterin decided to utilize the concept in order to create a Turing-complete programming language - a computer science theory describing programming languages as being able to complete any task given enough computing power.
Creating Ethereum
Near the end of 2013, the young programmer published his idea of Ethereum via a whitepaper which he sent out to his friends. He eventually founded a team of likely-minded individuals, and as time passed, they have perfected Ethereum with each theoretical iteration.
Ethereum officially came to be in January 2014, co-founded by Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin, Mihai Alisie, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Gavin Wood. Consequently, they held a crowdfunding event by selling the project’s Ether tokens in an initial coin offering (ICO).
Initially, the team collected 31,000 Bitcoin worth around $16 million at the time. A shift in volatility caused Bitcoin to crash, and the team lost millions of dollars. However, Buterin and the crew had enough to jumpstart Ethereum, which began by establishing the Ethereum Foundation.
The project’s massive crowd sale earned it a great deal of fame not only within the blockchain industry but outside in the real world as well. Major publications have reported about the event, which gave the project a new layer of legitimacy.
Numerous versions were tested, changed, and redefined at this part of the journey. The Ethereum Foundation worked on many ideas, and the first stable version arrived to the public in July 2015 under the (version) name of ‘Frontier.’
After confirming that the first launch is a success and that it was stable enough for not only developers but end-users as well, the team decided to migrate Ethereum to a so-called homestead version, which occurred in March 2016.
Being usable by less technically-minded individuals, Ethereum officially launched the ‘final’ version of its product that came with many technological improvements and ease of use. Exchanges soon began to list Ether (ETH) en-masse, and the number of nodes powering the blockchain network has almost surpassed those of Bitcoin.
DAO: The first major issue
Apart from scalability, which represented a major issue for the Ethereum Network, there are also a couple of dramatic events which have shaken Vitalik Buterin’s creation to its core. Ethereum’s development progressed slowly, but certain encounters with hackers and trolls were enough to momentarily disrupt the project.
The most famous event is the creation of The DAO, a form of blockchain-based e-governance system set up on Ethereum. During its first and only ICO, The DAO collected $150 million from more than 11,000 investors in a historical crowdfunding round.
The DAO - Logo
The problem is that the DAO was not secure and that it suffered a hack on June 17 2016 during which an anonymous individual drained $50 million worth of Ether from the project’s funds. While Ethereum was safe, an exploit in the DAO itself left enough room for a hacker to create a copy of the project and steal the funds.
In an incredibly short time, the ETH price dropped from $20 to $13. Due to the project’s governance system, developers had no way of dealing with the mess without massive approval from the community. Since voting required a lot of time and effort, it was impossible for the Ethereum team to deal with the issue at hand quickly.
For Ethereum’s developers, the only remaining option was to go nuclear: Ethereum hardforked into a new blockchain network and a majority of users migrated while those who have refused stayed with the old chain and created Ethereum Classic. The hard fork raised concerns about Ethereum’s decentralization which caused a split within the community.
Online trolls fake Buterin’s death
The blockchain industry was shaken to the core one more time on June 25, 2017, when online trolls from 4Chan began to circulate fake stories of Vitalik Buterin’s death. Anonymous individuals reported about a car crash incident that resulted in Ethereum losing $4 billion of its market value. After realizing that it was a hoax, the market retraced and returned to its former value.
Buterin had to prove that he is alive by taking a selfie along with the latest Ethereum block number and its transaction hash.
The bizarre chain of events was enough for investors to realize that Vitalik Buterin’s existence is a driving factor of the industry’s growth. Without him, the dream for programmable money (a term used to describe Ethereum) was gone.
Final Word
Everyone has a unique story about how they managed to get into crypto. Some have mined Bitcoin after finding out about it on Bitcointalk, some came into contact with Bitcoin while selling illegal items on The Silk Road, and some have even heard about the digital market by being a fervorous member of the cypherpunk movement.
All in all, everyone has entered the crypto space in the weirdest way possible. For Vitalik Buterin, the journey started with a temper tantrum caused by a video game and a newly gained interest for all things not centralized.
Vitalik Buterin might not be Satoshi Nakamoto but he doesn’t need to be. With his expertise, bright mind, and philosophical outlook on decentralized governance, Buterin had enough of an impact on the blockchain industry to at least come near to Nakamoto’s own ingenuity.
With the arrival and development of Ethereum 2.0, a proof of stake blockchain for smart contracts, Buterin has the chance to shake the industry one more time by introducing a truly scalable protocol. Will cryptocurrencies finally come close to Visa-like transaction throughput? We will have to wait on Buterin to give us the answer.
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