Who is Vitalik Buterin: The Man Who Co-Created Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer best known for his work on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. He first became involved in the Bitcoin community in 2011 when he co-founded the magazine Bitcoin. He is mostly known for his work on Ethereum, a blockchain platform that serves as a decentralized computer for DApps.
In 2013, Buterin took a 6-month trip around the world to talk with Bitcoin developers. He understood that he could create a novel by re-writing it on the Bitcoin blockchain. He demonstrated how Bitcoin could be used on a calculator, and how a future blockchain could be used on a smartphone. He increased the system’s strength by making it more general-purpose to blockchain networks.
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, and Ether (ETH) is a digital currency built on the Ethereum blockchain network.
Buterin co-created Ethereum, the blockchain that is the foundation for a lot of tasks, including developing applications and programs using the strength of cryptocurrencies like Ether. Ethereum’s platform operates through the use of smart contracts, which are programs that can be saved and executed on the Ethereum network.
Childhood
Born on 31 January 1994, Vitalik Buterin was from Moscow Oblast, Russia. He lived there till the age of 6 years. His parents decided to move to Canada for better job opportunities.
He was put in a program for the talented while he was in the third grade of a primary school in Canada. He realized that he was different from his friends and teachers because he had a special talent. Vitalik had a natural inclination for subjects like math and programming. He was interested in economics from a young age and could do math problems in his head twice as fast as other kids his age.
Buterin was an unknown person to social get-togethers. People used to talk about him a lot when he was younger because he was really good at math. After spending 4 years at the Abelard school, a private school in Toronto, Canada, Vitalik moved on to other pursuits. His view of education changed after he started attending the school, as did his grades and approach. Abelard’s primary goal in life was to gain knowledge through his own studies, rather than rely on others.
He was also into World of Warcraft from 2007 to 2010. While Blizzard decided to get rid of the damage element from his favored warlock’s Siphon Life skill, he felt sad and went to sleep. He understood how difficult centralized services could be, and he left World of Warcraft.
Student Life
He found Bitcoin while searching for a new path in life in 2011. He was skeptical and couldn’t see how it could be valuable if it wasn’t physically supported. At first, Vitalik was not interested in Ethereum. But as he learned more about it, he became fascinated by it. He wanted to be a part of this new and innovative economy, but he didn’t have the money to buy Bitcoin or the computational strength to mine them. After he lost his job, he looked for work related to Bitcoin on various forums and eventually started writing articles for a blog. He was paid about 5 Bitcoin per article.
He looked into all distinct economic, political, and technological sides of cryptocurrency at the same time. He wrote articles that caught Mihai Alise’s interest, and they eventually founded Bitcoin Magazine together in late 2011. He was spending more than thirty hours a day voyaging, writing, and working on Crypto, so he chose to leave university.
He found that many crypto projects were focused on specific uses, and not broad enough.
Vitalik realized that he could rewrite all the protocols using a more general programming language.
A Turing-complete programming language allows a computer to solve any problem that can be solved by algorithms, given enough time and memory. He was rejected by current cryptocurrency projects, so he decided to create his own, which became Ethereum.
Ethereum
In 2013, Vitalik wrote a white paper that he gave to some of his friends. They shared it with more people. Around 30 people visited Vitalik as a result of the idea. The original idea behind Ethereum was to create a digital currency. The vision of the team changed over the years and by 2014 they realized that it is quite simple to make decentralized file storage. Conceptions such as name registry can be created with only a few lines of code.
In January 2014, the project was announced to the public by members of the core team, which include Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alise, Joe Lubin, Anthony Di Lorio, Gavin Wood, and Charles Hoskinson. At a Bitcoin meeting in Miami, Vitalik displayed Ethereum. The core team eventually decided to have an Initial Coin Offering for Ether. An ICO is the native token of the Ethereum system, used to support development. He received the Thiel Fellowship grant of 100,000 dollars at the same time.
The team generated over 31 thousand Bitcoin from the ETH sale, which was about 18 million dollars at the time. The Ethereum team came up with the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss company that would oversee the development of Ethereum’s open-source software. Despite some turbulence, the crowdfunding campaign for Ethereum was a success.
In general, the design of Ethereum adheres to a number of principles. These include universality, agility, modularity, simplicity, non-discrimination, and non-censorship.
Each Principle behind the Design of Ethereum
- Simplicity: The Ethereum protocol must be as easy as possible
- Agility: The Ethereum protocol’s info is not fixed in stone-new opportunities should be discovered as and while they come to.
- Universality: Rather than “features,” Ethereum offers an internal Turing-complete scripting language to make smart transactions.
- Non-discrimination and non-censorship: The protocol mustn’t vigorously restrict or avoid specific kinds of usage.
- Modularity: Ethereum must be advanced to the completest level feasible to benefit the whole cryptocurrency network, not only itself.
The Ethereum system is constantly being upgraded to improve its core architecture, such as the London and Berlin upgrades, as well as the upcoming Shanghai hard fork. The upgrades combine many network variations to move Ethereum towards Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2), also called Serenity.
Learn more at: What is Ethereum?
The Struggles of Ethereum
The DAO Attack
The Ethereum network can be used to establish and run DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). Over 11000 people invested ETH into the DAO, earning them over 150 million in return. However, the DAO was hacked due to flaws within its code.
After the attack, Vitalik encouraged a soft fork of the Ethereum system that would prevent the attacker from moving the stolen currency and would blacklist the attacker. The attacker wrote a letter to the Ethereum community appealing that the money was acquired legitimately, but as per the smart transaction’s rules, this is not possible. The attacker said that anyone who tries to take Ether will face legal consequences.
Some people didn’t accept the hard fork that restored the stolen funds, leading to the Ethereum network splitting into two blockchains: Ethereum Classic (the original blockchain) and Ethereum (the newer blockchain). This was up for debate since blockchains are designed to be uniform and unyielding to censorship. The situation created technical issues and raised questions about the morality and ethics of the technology- as well as the Ethereum project’s management team’s ability to handle the situation.
Compared to Ethereum Classic, Ethereum is more popular. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance supports Ethereum with over 200 members, including financial giants Citigroup and JPMorgan. The Ethereum chain is switching from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to make the Ethereum network more effective and able to run contracts more efficiently.
It is clear from the survey that Vitalik, Ethereum developers, and the global community were in agreement that the blockchain was necessary in its early days. Ethereum’s prominence as a key player in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance has grown since the DAO hack.
For further understanding: What is DAO?
Importance of ETH2 upgrades
Ethereum 2.0 is expected to bring many significant improvements to the existing network, including speed, price, miner concerns, and functionality. Vitalik Buterin realized that Ethereum’s current version has become a victim of its own success, with demand driving network fees to new highs. As a result, most contracts were too expensive for the average person.
While Ethereum does have similarities to the App Store, it is mostly used as a utility system. This means that a lot of other things are created within the Ethereum space.
Blockchain technology is struggling to keep up with the demand for contract negotiations. The technology team at Ethereum is working on scalability and proof-of-stake, which is pretty important. Proof-of-stake allows for faster transactions and reduced fees compared to the earlier proof-of-work paradigm. By stake pooling their Ethereum assets, stakeholders can earn rewards and build up their holdings over time.
Vitalik noted in May 2021 that it was taking a lot more time to build Ethereum than he had anticipated. He mentioned that the Ethereum team assessed that proof-of-stake would take approximately the same amount of time as proof-of-work, whereas it actually took much longer.
He said that Ethereum’s “most promising solution” for scalability is different from the others because it has the potential to be a lasting solution, and not just a temporary fix. This long-awaited feature is known as sharding. This text is discussing sharding, which is a way of dividing up a database so that it can be spread across multiple servers. This is done in order to reduce the amount of traffic on the network and to increase the number of transactions that can be processed per second. The shard chains are anticipated to raise Ethereum’s data storage and get access to capability by allowing the Ethereum network to be divided into multiple chains.
The shift to the new network is largely due to the decentralization of power from miners and developers to Vitalik and his team. It even changes buyers’ hopes of getting bonuses corresponding to their network ownership situation. Therefore, Ether will become more like a security asset than a decentralized network currency.
Vitalik Buterin in China
whether or not the Chinese government has a clear stance on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and the Ethereum system are being adopted by businesses of all sizes across the country. The progression is partly due to his personality, since he was able to learn the Chinese language in just a few months using a mobile phone app.
In China, Ethereum is being investigated as a potential tool for institutional investors. Peking University, one of the top universities in China, is building an Ethereum lab to work on protocol enhancements and application usage cases within Chinese supply chains and energy markets. The Royal Chinese Mint, a subsidiary of China Banknote Printing and Minting, is testing Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard and smart transactions to digitize the Yuan (Chinese Currency). There are many different organizations working on various aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem, including both startups and established corporations. Some of the most active participants are founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
A number of equity changes, regional commodity exchanges, and financial asset exchanges made a ChinaLedger Alliance in May 2016. The goal is to create an open-source Blockchain protocol that developers can continue to develop in the coming years to meet China’s very specific regulatory needs. The Internet Commission of the Securities Association of China is working with Blockchain community leaders like Ethereum founder Buterin as advisors.
Will is also a general partner at Fenbushi, the most eminent Chinese firm that invests in corporations enabled by Blockchain technology.
Vitalik Buterin Russia
Digital currencies are decentralized and uncontrollable, which goes against everything Russia stands for. This made Vitalik Buterin, an extraordinary prominent person in Russia. In his speech to over 5000 people at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre in 2017, he was interrupted by an audience member who shouted “liar!” In his speech, Vitalik stated that Russia is one of the leading three states in research and experimentation of Blockchain technologies, along with Singapore and England. Also, Moscow claims to have a large number of nodes on the Ethereum system.
He said that President Vladimir Putin is familiar with blockchain, which means that the technology is very popular. According to a few media channels, in order for Vitalik to agree to the tour, he required that a meeting be held with the President. At the meet, Vitalik described the ways that his technologies could be used in Russia, and Putin agreed with him.
In 2017, the largest state-owned bank in the country, Sberbank, announced that it had joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Before that, the only Russian organization in the group was QIWI. Sberbank has previously stated that it has been working with Russian regulators, the Minister of Economy, other Russian banks, and the International Chamber of Commerce.
Vitalik bumped into a deal with the CEO of Yota Services while he was touring Russia in 2017. Yota is a Russian company that makes mobile phones and other devices that connect to the internet. The contract involves the construction of a new entity, Ethereum Russia, which will provide educational, event, and architectural evaluation services for the state-owned development bank Vneshtorgbank. It is even called VTB bank. This bank has also funded a center for blockchain research at the National University of Science and Technology. Ethereum Russia will also be supporting this research center. The novel center’s goal is to provide solutions to government regulations, working with corporate and government organizations.
Philanthropy Endeavours and Prizes
On May 12, 2021, Vitalik was praised for donating 1.2 billion dollars to India’s Covid-19 relief fund and sending a meme coin to the dog meme coin wallet (which has been given and transferred to his Etherscan public wallet). These digital tokens were created in the likeness of Shiba Inu, Akita Inu, and Dogelon Mars. The biggest payment (13,292) was moved to Givewell, a non-profit that evaluates charities. The Methuselah Foundation focuses on making people’s lives longer by giving away 1000 ETH and 430 Billion ELON Tokens. Vitalik made a donation of 1050 ETH to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in order to ensure that artificial intelligence will have a positive impact on humanity.
In 2014 he was awarded the Thiel Fellowship Award for his inventive scientific and technical projects. The same year, he won the prize for information technology software from the World Technology Network, beating out the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Vitalik was featured on Forbes 30 under 30 lists and Fortune 40 under 40 lists. The University of Basel awarded an honorary degree to him after 4 years in 2018. The Faculty of Business and Economics of the Institute honoured him at an annual commemoration of the founding of the university for his work on blockchain progression.
His Future Plans
Vitalik believes that Ethereum will play a major role in the Metaverse within 10 years. The Metaverse is a big virtual world where people can communicate with one another and with digital objects as avatars.
According to Vitalik, Ethereum has the potential to be a key part of the Metaverse due to its ability to connect different platforms together. In general, he believes that the Ethereum Name Service network provides a web 3.0 username for your BTC addresses and decentralized sites, and that the concept of users and items with cross-platform identities is a clear application that people do not understand. But Ethereum Name Service provides these solutions.
Vitalik finds zk-SNARKS, a cryptographic evidence that permits a person to set up that it has particular info without revealing it, the most intriguing. It eliminates the need for communication between the prover and the verifier.
Vitalik thinks that zk-SNARKS will be the most widely installed privacy-preserving technology within the next 3 decades. He thinks it will be a big revolution because it will become more mainstream over the next 1-2 decades.
Ethereum is a long-term cryptocurrency that will help decentralized finance, or Defi, succeed in the next few years. Many people are waiting for the official rules to be put into place before they take action.
As long-term investors watch the employment of such regulations as a basis of stability that may result in extensive adoption, companies and major investors of the market see the view of regulation limiting the prevailing flexibility. If markets are controlled, they are more secure for everyday people, and Ethereum, with its many decentralized apps and programs, could become more commonplace.
