Vitaly Dmitriyevich “Vitalik” Buterin (Russian: Виталий Дмитриевич Бутерин; born January 31, 1994) is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.
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Personal life
Buterin was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia, to Dmitry Buterin, a computer scientist, and Natalia Ameline (née Chistyakova). He lived in the area until the age of six when his parents emigrated 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.
Buterin attended the Abelard School, a private high school in Toronto, for four years, which he said, “proved to be among the most interesting and productive years of my life; the closer connection between students and teachers the level of depth at which the material was taught, made me want to learn, and to focus on learning as my primary goal”. Buterin has written that although he was “never particularly inspired by the traditional education system”, when subjects were presented with “dedication and focus on intellectual inquiry”, he said:”I noticed my attitude and my results almost immediately and drastically change. Education is ultimately much more than simply memorizing individual facts, or even learning individual concepts. What matters most: learning how to think, learning how to reason and learning how to learn.”
Buterin learned about Bitcoin, from his father, at age 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.
On June 25, 2017, Buterin was the subject of a death hoax originating from 4chan.
On 30 November 2018, Vitalik Buterin received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel on the occasion of the Dies Academicus
Career
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 at the time) 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
Buterin is a co-creator and inventor of Ethereum, which describes it in the ethereum white paper as being “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).
Open source software
Buterin 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.
Vitalik Buterin net worth
Vitalik Buterin’s net worth is recurrently estimated at between one and a dozen billion US dollars.