Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer. Vitalik has been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, co-founding and writing articles for Bitcoin magazine.
But he is known primarily as the genius child behind Ethereum, the second most valued and recognized cryptocurrency platform in the world after Bitcoin. At the time of writing this article, his visionary project has enormous market capital of more than 65,000 million dollars and continues to grow. Meanwhile, Vitalik is only 24 years old and has long-range plans for its creation.
Buterin was born in Kolomna, Moscow Oblast, Russia, and lived there until the age of six when his parents emigrated to Canada seeking better employment opportunities.
When he was in third grade of elementary school in Canada, Buterin was relocated to a class for specially gifted children, and began to develop his skills in math, programming, and economics.
He was also able to mentally add three-digit numbers, at double speed than his peers. He attended The Abelard School in Toronto, whose teaching is based on the Socratic method.
He was an avid player of World of Warcraft between 2007 and 2010, but the fact that Blizzard eliminated a game feature of one of his characters made him leave WoW and become aware of the danger posed by centralized systems. This change helped him discover Bitcoin decentralized digital currency in 2011.
He received a Bronze Medal in the International Computing Olympiad in 2012. He attended the University of Waterloo as a student but dropped out in 2014, when he received the Thiel Fellowship scholarship , and began working full time in the Bitcoin digital currency.
Ethereum
At the end of 2013, Vitalik Buterin described his idea in a white paper, which he sent to some of his friends, who in turn sent him further. As a result, some 30 people contacted Vitalik to discuss the concept. I was waiting for criticism and people pointing out critical errors in the concept, but it never happened.
In January 2014, as part of the "North American Bitcoin Conference" in Miami, Vitalik Buterin presented his new cryptocurrency platform, Ethereum.
Among the ten most outstanding points of your vision for this cryptocurrency are the following:
1- Next generation
It is a next-generation cryptocurrency and a decentralized application platform. In this sense, Ethereum allows making person-to-person transfers, creating virtual purses and signing contracts, all without the supervision of any person or financial institution.
2- The "serious scalability problems"
They are presented when building on Bitcoin. In his speech he explained that Ethereum is a platform that works on the concept of contracts that act as an automated agent, and that has a more powerful scripting language for developers.
The issue of scalability could not be ignored, about what Buterin said he was trying to develop a protocol as free of master nodes as possible.
He also mentioned that after having launched Plasma's whitepaper, this proposal for scalable intelligent contracts will begin to be developed; which will be carried out in parallel with the development of other projects focused on scalability that will end up complementing each other.
3- Secondary currencies
For Beturin among the uses of Ethereum, the ability to build secondary coins for highly specialized purposes stands out. "We do not have a coin. Let's have 1,000 coins. "
4- Smart contracts
The currency, called Ether has a main dissimilarity with the Bitcoin is that the creation of Vitalik is not finite, has no defined limit and therefore will not automatically become a deflationary currency.
But his idea is much broader, it goes beyond the currency itself -which can not be used beyond its own platform- and it is in that amplitude where its true potential resides, which makes it escape from further questioning. raw. Specifically, in its main value bet: smart contracts.
5- Mitigate the financial management losses
The essence of this and all the cryptocurrencies, to a large extent, is to mitigate the serious damages that the bad financial management of large corporations and public administrations of doubtful ethics were causing to ordinary people, the majority use seems to be another.
The intention to avoid the powerful, to subtract part of that economic power that they treasure when part of the board is under their control, has vanished in favor of converting cryptocurrencies into one more market in which to invest. A stock market, in a certain way, in which it is sold and bought, winning and losing, without real and massively taking advantage of the positive aspects of the system.
The idea of getting out of a government regulation, of escaping a part of the control power of large corporations, two worlds that he held responsible for part of the world's ills, seduced him.
"When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was that this thing was too good to be true and that I would have five professional cryptographers raining down on me and telling me how stupid I am for not seeing a lot of very obvious flaws. Two weeks later I was very surprised that none of that happened. It turned out that the core idea of Ethereum was good, fundamental, complete and totally solid . "
6- The Dapps calls
The applications that work exactly as they are programmed without the possibility of inactivity, censorship, fraud or interference of third parties ". The dapps calls are executed in a chain of blocks built according to the needs of the project, as we discussed lines above. "A hugely powerful shared global infrastructure that can move the value and represent ownership of the property", that distributed software without limitations that runs on multiple computers.
7- Hackproof
Among the objectives outlined by Buterin highlights the fact that Ethereum will eventually be "quantum-proof", ie, hack-proof by means of cryptography and quantum operations. This would be possible after the complete development and application of EIP 86 and Casper, since it would enable network support to any algorithm that the user wishes to use.
8- DAO
One of the most brilliant moments in the history of Ethereum took place in April 2016, thanks to the materialization of one of the possible applications of the Blockchain: a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO). It was created by the German startup Slock.it, with the aim of building a venture capital company without people, where investors will make all decisions through intelligent contracts.
The initial DAO project currency offer opened on April 30 and by May 21 had already raised $ 150 million , from 11,000 investors. So far, this had been the largest collective fundraising (crowdfunding) in history.
This fact represented for Ethereum a demonstration of confidence in his protocol.
9- Ethereum frontier and homestead
The Ethereum Frontier network was launched on July 30, 2015, as a first milestone in the development of Ethereum . From there, developers began writing smart contracts and decentralized applications to implement on Ethereum's live network. In addition, the miners began joining the network to help secure the Ethereum block chain.
One year later, on March 14, 2016, what is considered the first "stable" launch in the history of Ethereum, called Homestead, takes place. This update of the network occurred in block 1,150,000. From there, the block chain was officially described as "safe" by the developers.
10- Metropolis
On October 16, 2017, Byzantium was implemented as part of the update defined in the Ethereum development roadmap. This is one of the two stages in which Metropolis is divided, the third of four development phases established by the creators of the network. The second stage is called Contantinopla, which is not yet implemented.
Byzantium was made as part of the 4,370,000 block, and involved improvements that included the introduction of transactions through the zkSNARK protocol, the delay of the "time bomb" difficulty, receipts of the transaction status, and intelligent contract updates.
Despite the difficulties faced, Ethereum's balance is positive. It has remained the second most important cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and in January 2018 it recorded the highest valuation in its history. On January 13, according to CoinMarketCap, 1 Ether came to have a value equivalent to $ 1,432.88, and its capitalization was close to $ 139,000 million.
Currently, the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks process three and five transactions per second respectively, while Visa reaches about 20,000.
Although there are still things to resolve, Ethereum has earned the trust of those who look for a technological alternative in Blockchain. A clear example is the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which emerged in February 2017 for business development of applications in the Blockchain of Ethereum.