Who is Vitalik Buterin?

Vitalik Buterin, 2016
Born January 31, 1994 (age 23)
Kolomna, Russia
Residence Singapore
Citizenship Russia, Canada
Nationality Russian
Fields Digital contracts, Digital currencies, Game Theory
Alma mater University of Waterloo
Known for Ethereum, Bitcoin Magazine

Vitalik Buterin (Russian: Виталий Бутерин) is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

Personal life

Buterin was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia and lived in the area until the age of six when his parents immigrated to Canada in search of better employment opportunities. While in grade three of elementary school in Canada, Buterin was placed into a class for gifted children and started to understand that he was drawn to math, programming, and economics. He also had the ability to add three digit numbers in his head at twice the speed of his peers.

Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father at 17. In 2012, he obtained a Bronze Medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics. In 2013 he visited developers in other countries who shared his enthusiasm for code. He returned to Toronto later that year and published a white paper proposing Ethereum. He attended the University of Waterloo but dropped out in 2014, when he received the Thiel Fellowship in the amount of $100,000, and went to work on Ethereum full-time.

Buterin currently resides in Singapore.

Endeavors
Beginnings at Bitcoin Magazine

Buterin met a person on a bitcoin chat forum trying to start a bitcoin blog. The owner offered five bitcoin (about $3.50) to anyone who would write an article for him. Buterin wrote for the site until its website shut down soon thereafter due to Bitcoin's lack of mainstream attention.

In September 2011, another person reached out to Buterin about a new publication called Bitcoin Magazine, a position which Buterin would accept as the first co-founder, and contribute as a leading writer.

In addition Buterin wrote about bitcoin-related topics for other publications, including Bitcoin Weekly. Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 later began publishing a print edition and has been referred to as the first serious publication dedicated to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Magazine was then purchased by BTC Media, where Buterin continued to write until mid-2014.

In addition, he held a position on the editorial board of Ledger, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes full-length original research articles on the subjects of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Ethereum

He is a co-creator and inventor of Ethereum, described as a “decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one” that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and programs that share a single blockchain (a cryptographic transaction ledger).

Ethereum was first described in a Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language.

Open source software

Vitalik has contributed as a developer to other open source software projects. Some early examples are: Kryptokit, pybitcointools, multisig.info, and btckeysplit. He also contributed to DarkWallet by Cody Wilson, Bitcoin Python libraries, and the cryptocurrency marketplace site Egora.

Death hoax

On June 25, 2017, Buterin was the subject of a death hoax that caused the price of Ethereum to crash.

Awards and recognition

Thiel Fellowship Award, 2014
World Technology Award in the IT Software category, 2014
Fortune 40 under 40 list, 2016.

In his own words:

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. 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.

In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin. At first, I was skeptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested. I started writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly initially at a meek wage of $1.5 per hour, and soon with Mihai Alisie cofounded Bitcoin Magazine.

In late 2011, I participated in a high school programming competition where players program the code for a team of simulated robots that then fight each other. I won third place. Someone asked me: what was my strategy? Others gave command-and-control strategies such as "I went for the center". I simply replied "I gave each agent a utility function and let them independently act to maximize their own objectives". That moment would inform my political beliefs for years to come.

In 2012, I entered the University of Waterloo; in 2013 I realized that crypto projects were taking up 30h/week of my time, so I dropped out. I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general - hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since

My interests include math, algorithms, cryptography, mechanism design, economics, social science, politics (I love pointing out similarities between governance challenges of "apolitical" crypto projects and the eternal stupidity that is mainstream geopolitics), rationalist philosophy, and the intersection of it all.

Age: 23 (for now)

Residence: Cathay Pacific Airlines

Political affiliation: Cuckservative

Drinks/smokes/drugs: green tea

Religion: crypto

Favorite pastime: countersignalling

Occupation: It's complicated
WORK
Egora
EDUCATION
University of Waterloo
The Abelard School
Life

Reference/source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin
https://about.me/vitalik_buterin