Who is Vitalik Buterin?
Vitaly Dmitriyevich Buterin known as „Vitalik“ was born in Kolomna, Russia, on 31 January 1994. At a very young age, he proved to be exceptionally intelligent. At the age of four, he was already able to create complex tables on Excel. At the age of seven, he wrote an encyclopaedia on rabbits.
But it was mathematics and computer science that fascinated young Vitalik. He won the bronze medal at the International Computer Olympics in 2012.
He became interested in distributed registers while playing video games. More specifically, it was with the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft that he became aware of the weaknesses Bitcoin Cycle of centralised systems. He then thought about the notion of decentralization.
Vitalik discovered Bitcoin in 2011 thanks to his father. After a short stint at the University of Waterloo, he decided to leave everything to devote himself full-time to cryptology.
The conception of Ethereum
He co-founded the same year, together with the Romanian coder Mihai Alisie, the famous Bitcoin Magazine. That same year, he started to design his own cryptomonnaie, Ethereum. Bitcoin’s scripting language seemed too limited to him: he decided to create a blockchain platform with wider possibilities.
Several years of travelling and various experiences follow for Vitalik Buterin. For example, he spends some time with a community of crypto-anarchist coders.
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin publishes Ethereum’s whitepaper, his blockchain platform working as a proof of work like Bitcoin, but based on an account system and not on UTXO. Similarly, Solidity, Ethereum’s programming language, is Turing-complete, which allows to create recursive loops and thus to program complex transactions that can be automated – smart contracts.
Since the creation of Ethereum, Vitalik has become a recognised and respected figure in the cryptosphere and in scientific circles. His innovative ideas and his global vision of human and computer networks fuel many debates.
He has also received several awards, such as the Thiel Fellowship Award and the World Technology Award in the IT Software category in 2014. The young prodigy even met Vladimir Putin at the International Economic Forum in St Petersburg in 2017.