All About Vitalik Buterin: The Ethereum Creator

Vitalik Buterin is a programmer of Russian descent, and he was born on 31st January 1994. He is a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, and most especially the Ethereum blockchain.

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Early Life
Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia, to Dmitry Buterin & Natalia Ameline, and they lived in Russia till he was about 6 years old. His parents felt they needed better employment, and that prompted them to immigrate to Canada. Buterin was enrolled at a school and it was discovered that he had a flair for economics, mathematics, programming, and he also had the gift of calculating 3-digits sums in his head at 2x the speed of his classmates and peers.
At 17, he was taught about Bitcoin by his Dad who was a computer scientist. In 2013 he began to travel and meet other developers with whom he was able to rub minds with about coding. He proposed Ethereum via a whitepaper he published but did not begin work until 2014 after he got the Thiel Fellowship which gave him $100,000.

Career
On a bitcoin forum, a forum user was trying to start a blog and needed a writer with knowledge about bitcoins, hence, the owner of the blog offered 5 bitcoins to anybody who could do an article for him. Buterin took the offer and wrote for the blog till it was shut down. In 2011, Buterin became a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, and he wrote for the magazine till 2014, when he decided to step aside and begin his own project – Ethereum

Ethereum
Buterin had an idea, a brilliant one at that, he saw a flaw in the Bitcoin protocol and knew just how to make it right, he proposed that Bitcoin was in need of a scripting structure that would be suitable for application development, however, no one agreed with him, hence, he decided to come up with his own blockchain that would be better than Bitcoin’s.

Buterin invented the Ethereum blockchain, along with others, they worked and made the blockchain functional. The Ethereum blockchain is a platform for the creation and development of applications and cryptocurrencies. The Ethereum yellow paper was written by Ethereum Co-founder, Dr. Gavin Wood, and it outlines in details, Ethereum Virtual Machine’s specifications, which takes care of the ledger and processes smart contracts.

In 2014, for the project to begin, Buterin, along with the other founders (Dr. Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin) launched a crowdfunding campaign, where “Ether” (Ethereum token) was bought by participants, as these tokens functioned as a means to owning shares in the project.

The crowdfunding was able to raise up to $18m. It was not an elaborately designed platform, however, it offered developers a good platform to create their own DApps.

Ethereum’s smart contract protocol also took off, growing into today's community of developers, which has attracted tech giants like Microsoft and IBM.

The Ethereum blockchain was created for the purpose of the creation of decentralized applications and cryptocurrencies, and there is no doubt that the blockchain technology has lived beyond expectations.