The 23-year-old Russian genius who betrayed Bitcoin and created his own cryptomoney.

An annoyance with a video game lit the fuse. He was a blogger collecting bitcoins, loves the t-shirts of unicorns and wants to change global finance (and more) with Ethereum.

Bitcoin's origin has an air of mysticism and technological disruption. Satoshi Nakamoto. This is the pseudonym under which the name that shaped this digital currency in 2008 is hidden. No one knows for sure who he is. It is also not known whether he lives or not. He hasn't given signals since. It is not known whether it is a single individual, two or a large group of people who hide behind this name.
There were attempts to appropriate the merit and hang the medal. But they were all in vain or simple smoke curtains. Before he' disappeared' from the face of the Earth, he left a testament: a document - distributed among the members of a cryptographic mailing list - that laid the foundations and protocol of what is the most widespread' cryptomonneda' in the world.

Those postulates have been engraved in stone. Immovable laws for those loyal to Bitcoin, who have in this text a faith comparable to that of the great religions in their sacred books. Deviations are not allowed, you have to follow it to the letter, as dictated by its creator before' leaving' this world.
Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin have much in common. Both are prophets. Both are the minds that have created a digital currency. One from Bitcoin and the other from Ethereum, the trendy' cryptomontage' that could threaten the future of the most popular of these currencies.

The coin that wants to super Visa

Bitcoin and this currency were very close in June with 39.9% and 33.2% of the market, respectively. That caught the attention of millions of people, despite the huge gap in terms of stock prices. Today, Bitcoin is close to $4,000, Ethereum's $300. It matters little for its creator, who pulls out breast and predicts that it will surpass "in number of operations" to Visa in two years.
Bitcoin processes less than 3 operations per second, the five of us,"he said at a conference organized this week by Techcrunch, where he took the opportunity to divide humanity into two groups:" Those who have heard of Bitcoin and ordinary people who have not.

Buterin is 23 years old. Unlike Nakamoto-san, you know who he is, where he comes from, what his face looks like... He's not hiding. His physical appearance reveals his youth but gives us a glimpse of other things. This is not an ordinary person. Born in Moscow, he moved to Toronto when he was six years old, where his parents sought employment opportunities and' resides' in Switzerland, where the foundation that Ethereum promotes is located. The quotation marks are because, as he has recognized on several occasions, he spends a large part of his time away from home, evangelizing about the virtues of his cryptomonnage, which has been running for four years and accumulates a value of billions of euros.

His brilliant mind earned him a place in a class of' super-gifted': something that marked his character forever

Unicorn T-shirts and urban legends

How would you imagine the genius behind one of the technological trends that can turn the global financial system upside down? Probably, let's be honest, not like Vitalik Buterin. A furtive smile difficult to spot, escorted by acne notches that once again give away the prematureity of its success. A slim figure with sharp elbows that conjugates a good number of nervous gestures every time he enters a stage and waits for his moment to speak.
Behind that elusive character is actually a brilliant mind, which in its school stage was removed from its classmates and enrolled in a high-performing educational program for young people with an unusual IQ. Come on, for gifted people. He became interested in economics, mathematics and programming. Something that marked his character forever because, little by little, he was' closing in' on himself and his eagerness to accumulate knowledge. That disconnected him from his classmates. He became a' freak'. A misfit.

All his story comes wrapped up in an outfit that does nothing more than add attractiveness and mystery to his person. T-shirts and sweatshirts plagued with unicorns and rainbow jets. Accessories full of cats references and socks from anime series and characters like' Hello Kitty'.
His image is cannon fodder for the fables of specialized liars, replete with people who confess to be his followers and his postulates. You can get fed up with reading threads full of debate about whether you have any degree of autism. Other texts collect unconfirmed facts as he learned Mandarin in a few months. And there are those who seem determined to draw him as a prophet detached from all that is material, claiming that his possessions enter a backpack.

What exactly is Ethereum?

Perhaps at this point it would be useful to clarify exactly what Ethereum is. It is related to Bitcoin but has wanted to go further than simply bypassing traditional financial controls with a cryptomontage. Buterin has created a top layer that is more likely to become a mere digital currency.
A good use of blockchain technology would be for services that need to be' decentralised'. Ethereum's structure makes it possible to make' person-to-person' transfers (Peer to peer), create virtual wallets and even sign instant compliance contracts, without any human action or bank supervision. The blockchain offers a high level of security and scalability. It can be used for a lot of things."

However, it warns of the danger surrounding these currencies. "The market is still young. People don't know how to distinguish between those who will survive in the long run and those who won't,"he says in an interview with an Israeli newspaper. "It's growing at a rate that's hard to control. I don't sign up for most cryptomonths because I think they are overvalued,"he concludes.

An annoyance, the fuse that set everything on fire

But how does a young man like Vitalik become such an eminent figure? For a rage. Monumental. He was a hardcore World of Warcraft player. Of those who spend hours and hours squeezing out every last detail of this video game. However, a Blizzard change in software broke the idyll. I was 17 years old. This might have been anecdotal, but it lit the wick of something bigger. The young man perceived it as a despotic decision, regardless of the community.

I don't sign up for most cryptomoney coins because I think they're overrated.

This was the perfect breeding ground for his interest in Bitcoin. As he had neither the resources to' mine' it nor to acquire it, he decided to work to earn it. He contacted a blogger who ended up paying him five bitcoins for each post. That precarious payroll was his runway. Months later he would start Bitcoin Magazine, his own medium, which would turn him into an authorized voice and open many doors for him in the sector.
In 2013 he was able to travel to a conclave on cryptomoney in California. What he saw there drove him to abandon his career at the University of Waterloo (Ontario) and give himself up in body and soul. He was able to do so thanks to a grant from the Peter Thiell Foundation, co-founder of Paypal, Trump's advisor and one of the most controversial people in Silicon Valley.

Weeks later he started a halfway around the world visiting different companies and experts who work on Bitcoin extensions spending the fortune he had amassed writing.
Nothing convinced him. He came home and started programming. Two weeks later I had a first sketch. He had changed Nakamoto-san's code and proposals. It had not stopped at the financial level, but opened up to more functionalities. He had left the fold. He had broken the unwritten law of respecting the original protocol. I had created Ethereum. And many followed him. Now it remains to be seen how far it will go -