Vitalik Buterin's biography: both an isolated island and a signal tower

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Editor | Elaine

"The signal tower is built, and the isolated island is connected to the world."

On July 30, 2015, the sun shines through the windows of Vitalik Buterin's office, shining on his excited and anxious face. He held the mouse tightly and clicked the last button, announcing the birth of Ethereum on the Internet stage. Across the globe, followers of cryptocurrencies cheered, and the joy of dreams becoming reality filled the air.

In this way, Ethereum entered the blockchain field and became a digital revolution that caused a sensation worldwide.

Before the establishment of Ethereum, a 19-year-old young man insisted on building an innovative blockchain platform with the built-in Turing complete programming language as the core concept. After several years of hard work and struggle, Ethereum has successfully realized this vision, bringing an open, flexible and infinitely possible digital asset platform to the world.

As a public blockchain platform, the success of Ethereum is inseparable from the efforts of an important figure, namely Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. This issue of "AIO News People" column will bring you a close look at the story about Vitalik Buterin.

In this issue: Vitalik Buterin

island

Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia in 1994 in a family of IT programmers. When he was 4 years old, Vitalik received his first computer, which became the starting point for Vitalik to show his genius attributes. At only 4 years old, he embarked on the road of programming.

However, even gifted children cannot have perfect families. When Vitalik was 5 years old, his parents divorced. After the divorce, his father immigrated to Toronto, Canada with him. The decision to move to the other side of the world plunged young Vitalik into a completely unfamiliar environment. Because of the language barrier, he had to go to a nursery in a different language. For him, who is only 6 years old, this is a huge and painful adjustment process.

But fortunately, even with two major life changes, Vitalik's talent has not disappeared. In the third grade of elementary school, Vitalik showed extraordinary mathematical talent, and his mental calculation speed was twice as fast as that of his peers. At the age of 7, Vitalik had already started using computers for entertainment. He created a world made up of bunnies by himself and named it "Rabbit Encyclopedia". In Vitalik's world, there's math, diagrams, and calculations. At the age of 12, Vitalik could already entertain himself by writing simple games using the C++ programming language.

Despite Vitalik's prowess in mathematics and programming, his father was very worried: "Vitalik was very smart. But growing up was not easy. His mind was running very fast and it was difficult to communicate with people until he was 9." I didn't start talking until I was 10 or 10 years old. I was very worried. But then I realized that if this is the case, I can only give him more love."

During Vitalik's upbringing, his intelligence and creativity made him an island, alone but independent.

Vitalik is far away from the world of his peers, but keeps exploring himself, looking for his own path and dream. He keeps growing in solitude, like an isolated island standing in the endless sea, but there is infinite power deep in his heart.

The first signal

Like other geniuses, Vitalik has a unique way of perceiving the world, and this trait has deeply affected the way he interacts and communicates with others. While his skills in math and computing were impeccable, Vitalik's social skills were next to none.

Before entering high school, Vitalik had been wandering the campus alone, like a person stranded on an island, unable to integrate with the social world of his peers.

The loneliness in real life overwhelmed Vitalik, and he was always looking for a sustenance, a way to make him forget loneliness. So, he indulged in Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" game, and the skills and characters in the game became his source of happiness. However, three years later, the skills of his favorite game character were removed by Blizzard. After many protests to no avail, he was desperate for the game and the character he had spent three years working on, and decided to give up. And started looking for a way to break out of this centralized network centralization.

Fortunately, Vitalik, who suffered a major blow in the game world, began to learn how to socialize and establish connections with others through the Internet world.

“And, that’s when he got into the whole cryptocurrency and bitcoin space,” recalls Vitalik’s father.

Cryptocurrencies have been Vitalik's salvation, gradually pulling him out of his predicament. He became cheerful and talkative, learned to communicate with his peers, and enjoyed the joy of socializing. When discussing cryptocurrencies enthusiastically with netizens, Vitalik's face is always shining with excitement and high spirits.

If the computer was the only solace in Vitalik's lonely childhood, then the cryptocurrency was his magic key to open the door to social life, and it was also his first signal to connect to the outside world in his own way.

By exploring the field of cryptocurrency, Vitalik discovered the great potential in this field. In order to uncover the mystery of cryptocurrency, the long-sealed "Vitalik Island" sent a strong signal to the outside world, eager to communicate with more like-minded people study. By asking questions, he constantly absorbs new knowledge, making this unknown field gradually clear before his eyes.

Cryptocurrency has become a bridge for Vitalik to communicate with the outside world, allowing him to meet many like-minded friends in this community. They learn from each other, share experience, and jointly explore this new field. And these valuable experiences finally gave birth to Vitalik's pioneering idea - to create a brand new blockchain platform, namely Ethereum.

Second signal

Although cryptocurrencies have broken its own limitations for Vitalik, he has not limited his vision to the field of Bitcoin.

On the contrary, he proposed a new concept with a more grand perspective. This young genius has different insights. He is convinced that only by creating a new technology can the potential of Bitcoin be truly released. This new technology will be able to provide greater efficiency and flexibility to meet the needs of current Bitcoin hardware and software.

Based on this, Vitalik wrote a white paper at the age of 19 detailing his new project Ethereum. In the white paper, Vitalik proposed a new architecture, new technologies and new applications, which will become an important part of Ethereum.

In this white paper, he poured his vision into it, as if flying a signal on an isolated island, hoping to be seen and recognized by the whole world.

As Vitalik expected, the Ethereum white paper attracted a lot of attention once it was released, and Vitalik's ideas were well received in the Bitcoin community. Community members have affirmed the innovation, practicability and feasibility of Vitalik's white paper, and are full of expectations for the future development of Ethereum.

Vitalik's philosophy is undoubtedly exciting, because by creating a new programming language, we can free developers' hands and feet, allowing them to focus on their core projects and implement ideas and ideas quickly. At the same time, this new programming language should also have the characteristics of high quality, scalability and maintainability, so that developers can trust and rely on it more.

In this way, Vitalik Buterin used the Ethereum white paper to send a second signal to the outside world, which endowed him with the expectation of building a decentralized, equal, efficient and trustworthy world.

The third signal

With strong support from community members, Vitalik Buterin is determined to turn the vision in the Ethereum white paper into reality.

In June 2015, the first version of Ethereum was released, named Frontier. This also marks Vitalik Buterin's third signal to the world, putting his vision of "building a decentralized, equal, efficient and trustworthy world" into action.

All the ether promised to early investors was delivered without a hitch, and developers started weaving their dreams on Ethereum.

Just like the original intention of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum has successfully provided users with a digital, intelligent, and transparent decentralized medium. In the smart contract in Ethereum, users can write any contract they want, which has the highest versatility and plasticity. However, this also makes all vulnerabilities, including security holes, visible and may not be fixed quickly.

Once the third signal from Vitalik was sent out, it caused a huge echo. Ethereum once became one of the most concerned and widely used blockchain platforms in the world, triggering the development of distributed applications and smart contracts. new wave.

The signal tower is built into an isolated island to connect the world

From a genius boy who is out of tune with the world, to a pioneer who pushes the blockchain to the top of the wave. Vitalik Buterin has become V God in people's hearts.

However, there is no smooth sailing success in the world. As the cryptocurrency with the second largest market value in the world after Bitcoin, Ethereum has faced various crises and doubts since its birth.

On a dark night in May 2016, Ethereum's decentralized organization, The DAO, fell victim to a hack. The attack exploited a vulnerability in The DAO's code, resulting in the theft of $50 million in ether. This incident not only caused investors' doubts about the security of smart contracts, but also caused the value of Ethereum to drop from $20 to $10 overnight, causing the global market value to evaporate by $500 million.

At the time of life and death, Vitalik Buterin resolutely decided to give up his life to save the car. In order to allow users to recover their losses, the community launched a public vote to help users retrieve all lost Ethereum. However, this approach caused dissatisfaction among the public, and even led to a split within Ethereum. Some people led by Vitalik Buterin insist on updating vulnerabilities and running a new chain. They call themselves Ethereum (ETH); while the other part is Ethereum Classic (ETC), and they choose to continue to maintain the original Ethereum.

**What doesn't kill him will only make him stronger. **

In the magnificence of the crisis, Vitalik Buterin used fearless courage and wise decision to let Ethereum ride the wind and waves and turn the tide. In this battle, Vitalik and Blizzard made diametrically opposed choices, and made every effort to protect the rights and interests of users and not transfer their interests. It is precisely because Vitalik has consistently pursued dreams, has ideals in mind, and is committed to building a digital, intelligent, and transparent decentralized platform for users. In recent years, the technology of Ethereum has become increasingly mature and developed steadily, winning global acclaim. Ethereum, whose market value had fallen, has sprung up like mushrooms, soaring to $1,500 in a year and a half, an appreciation of 300 times.

Vitalik Buterin, an island that once stood alone in the ocean, miraculously built the signal tower of Ethereum, soaring into the sky, transmitting the light of the signal to every corner of the world.

The isolated island is connected to the world, and the signal tower is lit up. Just like the "time traveler" described by Proust, people can cross the vast sea and communicate with each other.

New signal

Flowers and applause did not change Vitalik Buterin. He is still the boy he once was, unswervingly building a world of decentralization, absolute equality, full of efficiency and trust. So when he discovered that some people were using Ethereum to speculate and make a fortune, he sent a signal again: I hope that all Ethereum users will mature, and that Ethereum cannot be reduced to a "tulip" for people to speculate and make money.

At the same time, Vitalik Buterin is not indulging in the success of Ethereum, but is keenly aware of the shortcomings of Ethereum: high transaction fees and various usability obstacles still exist. He said: "If we really want to fully realize this vision, there is still a lot of work to be done." And he is full of confidence: "Software development time is always longer than expected, so although there are delays, but It doesn’t matter. The sooner we get these things done, the better ethereum will be able to realize a larger part of its original vision.”

Regarding the future development of Ethereum, Vitalik recently published an article, mentioning three major technological transitions, namely L2 expansion transition, wallet security transition, and privacy transition. For Vitalik, user comprehension remains paramount: "We needed to make sure users could easily access the latest view of what their current assets are and what news is published for them."

Alone on an island as a young man, Vitalik was gifted with unique upbringing and eventually achieved greatness in his beloved field. Today, he has become a leader in the blockchain field, and the Ethereum platform he developed has become one of the important applications of blockchain technology.

On this isolated island, Vitalik built a signal tower, like a bridge connecting people from all over the world, providing a global decentralized network. People can transact and interact without trusting third parties, which makes the network safer and fairer.

**He hides in the boundless sea, but sends out a unique tremor to the world. **

**It is both an isolated island and a signal tower. **

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