If you want to understand digital currencies and blockchain, you need to go back to their roots. Today we will talk about a young man born in the 1990s, known as "V God" in the world. He is Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.
Young genius comes up with ideas through games
Buterin was born in Russia in 1994 and later moved to Canada. In 1998, V God, who was only 4 years old, received a computer from his father, which started his programming career. At the age of 12, V God, who was extremely talented, was able to write simple C++ games to entertain himself.
But in 2007, when "World of Warcraft" swept the world, being addicted to games almost made Buterin miss the opportunity of blockchain. Fortunately, God blessed his talent. In 2010, the skills related to V God's favorite character in "World of Warcraft" were canceled by Blizzard. This made V God angrily delete the game. Perhaps it was because of this experience that he came up with the idea of "decentralization". idea.
Join the currency circle and show your talents
In high school, under the influence of his father, Buterin came into contact with Bitcoin for the first time. By constantly writing relevant technological content, Buterin became famous in the currency circle, so he and several like-minded partners founded the Bitcoin industry magazine " Bitcoin Magazine”.
In 2013, Buterin chose to drop out of college just eight months after entering college and began to travel around the world looking for opportunities in Bitcoin projects. In November 2013, Buterin wrote the first version of Ethereum's white paper "Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform".
In view of the shortcomings of the Bitcoin system's insufficient scalability and only currency application, he proposed the establishment of a Turing-complete Ethereum system that supports smart contracts. He spread the first version of the Ethereum white paper through his circle of friends, and the first ten replies The person from Vitalik Mail became the co-founder.
In 2015, Ethereum was officially launched, marking the advancement of blockchain technology from the 1.0 era to the 2.0 era. At the same time, Buterin also designed a new cryptocurrency for Ethereum - Ether.
Technology application potential is unlimited
Everyone may know the subsequent story. The price of Ethereum increased 85 times throughout 2017, with the highest price reaching $1,380 at one time, making it the second largest digital currency by market value after Bitcoin.
Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum technology supports larger and faster transactions, and transaction costs are much lower than Bitcoin; in addition, Ethereum, as an ecosystem, can facilitate users to create decentralized transactions through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) decentralized applications (dApps), and these decentralized applications have shown great application potential and value in smart contract applicable industries such as insurance, crowdfunding, and real estate.
If Satoshi Nakamoto is the founder of the blockchain, Buterin is the pioneer of the blockchain. "From 0 to 1" or "from 1 to N", which one do you think has made a greater contribution?