Vitalik Buterin is the insatiable mind behind the creation of Ethereum.
He was born in Russia in 1994 and his family emigrated to Canada when he was 6, looking for better job opportunities. His father Dmitry Buterin, graduated in computer science and introduced Bitcoin to Vitalik when he was only 17 years old. Later, Dmitry would create the Blockgeeks website, where you can learn a lot about blockchain in English. At that time Bitcoin had been operating for only 2 years and Buterin quickly got carried away by technology and became "addicted" to understanding, studying it and acquiring some bitcoins.
As he had no money to buy bitcoins or powerful computers to be able to mine Buterin, he looked in several forums until he found someone who would pay him 5 bitcoins for each article. These articles caught the attention of Mihai Alisei, a Bitcoin enthusiast in Romania, and together they created the Bitcoin Magazine website in late 2011. It has become one of the most credible and popular resources for learning about blockchain and Bitcoin.
Like many of Bitcoin's early fans, Buterin was driven by the principle of equality that led him to voice the technology's disruptive potential. He believed that Bitcoin could be a means to democratize power concentrated in the elites. According to him: “To give power to the little ones, no matter how much they want to brown the pill, they will always have to withdraw power from the big ones. Personally, I say, screw the big guys. They already have enough money. ” Despite having updated his binary view in the meantime that everything in the world is good or bad, Buterin continues to believe that the powerful have too much power.
Buterin has always had above average intellectual abilities. He discovered most of them while still in school, after being placed in a program for students with above average skills, right in the 3rd year. There he was able to develop his skills in mathematics and programming and nurture an early interest in economics. Capabilities that grew until, at the age of 18, he won the bronze medal at the Informatics Olympics.
These characteristics took their toll, leaving him at the margin of his colleagues, without being part of the social events proper to those ages. However, it was in this loneliness, which dominated from an early age, that Buterin wrote his online articles on Bitcoin. And the more interest he gained in technology, the more relationships he created. In such a way, that despite its Russian and Canadian influences, it is considered a product of the culture of the Internet above the influences of any country. That's because most of their relationships were created online through chats and originated by mutual interests in Bitcoin.
During 2013, Buterin traveled to Israel, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas to meet programmers he had met online. Many of them were trying to create a more powerful version of Bitcoin. However, the way they were doing it was very difficult and ineffective. The most common idea was to add a new level of complexity to the existing code. But Satoshi had designed the protocol to limit the complexity of transactions, to avoid making the system slow and ineffective.
When he returned to Toronto, Buterin was convinced that this would not be the right way to increase Bitcoin's potential. For that purpose, an in-depth change would be necessary, going down to the level of the programming language chosen to write the code. But, with the necessary changes, it would be possible to have a new blockchain that from the beginning would be prepared to multiply the potential of Bitcoin and expand the spectrum of action to many areas of society.
In just a month, he outlined the idea and wrote the technical document he shared with 15 of his contacts, who in turn spread the word. 30 people returned their feedback on where the founding members of the team that joined in Miami in January 2014 at the North American Bitcoin Conference (North American Bitcoin Conference) would come from. It was at this conference that many of them first met face to face and where Buterin introduced Ethereum to the community. At the end of his talk, he was greeted with a long standing ovation and then swallowed by a crowd that had converted to the project and wanted to understand it better.
At this time, the project was still under development and Buterin at the University of Waterloo. In June 2014, at the end of the semester, Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship and left the university to dedicate 100% to Ethereum. This award, created by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Facebook's first foreign investor, worth $ 100,000, rewards young people who want to leave university to follow immediate ways to improve society and the world.
However, this amount was not enough to sustain his team. To that end, and also to increase its community, a pre-sale of ether was made - the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network. During July and September 2014, a total of more than 60 million ether were sold in exchange for bitcoins and at a rate that varied between 1337 and 2000 ether per bitcoin. A total of 31,591 bitcoins were invested by 9000 people, which were worth $ 18,439,086 at the time. These figures translate into an exchange rate of 31 cents per ether. Considering that ether is currently valued at around $ 170, the average initial investment of $ 2000 is valued at over one million dollars!
To supervise the legal and financial intricacies of this sale, the Ethereum Foundation was created, based in Zug, Switzerland, which today has a mission to ensure that Ethereum follows its initial vision. In addition to the 60 million ether, an additional 6 million have been created to serve as the foundation's long-term reserves and another 6 million to distribute to initial Ethereum contributors.
The more than $ 18 million raised broke the record for the largest amount of a single crowdfunding event. In addition to this record, this event reinforced the democratization that blockchain allows to create. Giving the opportunity for all those who believed in the project to invest in it, contrary to the technological industry that increasingly leaves the largest share of profits in the first stages of investment only accessible to restricted classes.
At the end of this pre-sale Vitalik Buterin, he had the resources to launch his project. Through his vision, he had managed to create a community that supported him and his project and who were now as dedicated as he is to creating the next level of blockchain.
