The life of 24-year-old V God: From a genius boy who develops games to the founder of Ethereum with a net worth of hundreds of billions
To understand digital currency and blockchain, in addition to Bitcoin, we have to mention Ethereum, which has the second largest market value.
10 years ago, the emergence of Bitcoin made people realize the existence of blockchain technology, and began to yearn for and explore the decentralized world; 5 years ago, the emergence of Ethereum allowed people to witness the huge potential and infinite potential behind the blockchain. possible. From some data, we can see the huge impact of Ethereum in the currency circle at that time: the price of ETH in 2017 was nearly 90 times higher than the low point; the ICO created by Ethereum became the most popular way of crowdfunding, The amount raised globally through ICOs exceeds US$4 billion; the total market value of global digital currencies also soared from US$18 billion at the beginning of the year to US$560 billion in 2017.
If Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin and blockchain, then the post-90s Vitalik created a new era of smart contracts and brought about a boom in the global cryptocurrency market. He was only 19 years old when he created Ethereum, and he was known as "V God" in the circle. Today, let’s get to know the 24-year-old V God again, and listen to his life story, how he went from a gifted boy with outstanding intelligence to the founder of Ethereum with a net worth of hundreds of billions.
He was regarded as a child prodigy since he was a child, and developed small games at the age of 10
V God was born in Russia in 1994, and immigrated to Canada with his father when he was 5 years old. He is a Russian-Canadian. He has been "innately gifted" since he was a child, and has extraordinary talents. In the third grade of elementary school, God V showed his extraordinary talent. When most people hadn't memorized the nine-nine multiplication tables, God V could already perform three-digit mental calculations at twice the speed of his peers, so he As a matter of course, he entered the "gifted youth class" specially set up by the school for gifted students.
By the fifth and sixth grades, everyone thought he was a math genius. He himself realized that he was better than ordinary people, and even felt a little distressed, "Why can't I play at an average level of 75 like everyone else." There are also rumors that when he was 7 years old, God V created a game called "" The complex document of "Rabbit Encyclopedia" is a small world composed of rabbits, which is full of mathematics, diagrams and calculations, and the rules in the world run strictly according to the formula.
V God recalled that he first came into contact with a computer when he was 10 years old. 10 years old is the age when children are addicted to games, and V God is no exception, and he is also an "Internet addict". Most children are playing with toys or chasing and fighting with their friends, but V God chooses to use computer programming to make small games. The first program he wrote was a game where the ball was shot by bouncing. V God later joked that this game was "Vitalik's version of "Space Invaders" (Space Invaders)". In addition, he also made some strategy games with the theme of medieval legends when he was a child.
V God's cute photos when he was a child
At the age of 13, God V began to indulge in playing "World of Warcraft", often sitting in front of the computer for a whole day, playing World of Warcraft every day. Until later, a game company canceled a certain skill of his beloved game character "Warlock" in a new version update. This game character V God has played to level 80. I emailed and contacted the engineers of the game company in the official forum, asking them to restore this skill, but the reply I got was "the company did this for game balance considerations, and it cannot be restored." Later, God V chose to give up playing Warcraft. This may also pave the way for V God's later thinking: In the Internet game world, players are usually weak as participants, and game developers are the control center of the game. One of the biggest drawbacks of this centralized service is that everything is The developer has the final say, and players can only choose to passively accept or quit the game.
From being dismissive of Bitcoin to being unable to extricate myself
To say when God V began to become attached to Bitcoin, it is necessary to talk about his father Dmitry Buterin. He was enlightened by his father before he knew Bitcoin. V God was 17 years old at the time, and his father had his own company, Wild Apricot, who once introduced the concept of Bitcoin to V God. At that time, Bitcoin was born less than 2 years ago. V God first heard about Bitcoin and most people at that time The reaction of people is the same, dismissive, thinking that Bitcoin has no real value and will not have long-term development.A selfie photo of V God and his father
Later, V God's father sold his company and became the co-founder of BlockGeeks, a blockchain incubator. V God once again learned about the concept of Bitcoin from his father, and learned that it is based on a decentralized This time he was deeply attracted and decided to study Bitcoin carefully, and he couldn't extricate himself from this research.
In March 2011, Vitalik began to write some articles about Bitcoin himself. He met a friend who wanted to set up a Bitcoin blog on the Bitcoin chat forum. Vitalik contributed articles to the website, and he could get 5 bitcoins for each article. (worth $3.5 at the time) until the website closed down; at the same time, he also wrote for a magazine called "Bitcoin Weekly". At that time, God V should have saved a lot of bitcoins. More importantly, V God has accumulated a lot of knowledge and first-hand information about Bitcoin during the period of writing, and has also made many friends who are also interested in Bitcoin. And blockchain technology also has a deeper understanding.
In September 2011, a friend named Mihai Alisie contacted V God and invited him to become the chief writer of the newly established "Bitcoin Magazine". V God also became the co-founder. In 2014 Continue to insist on writing contributions until the middle of the year. (In 2015, the magazine was acquired and changed to the web version, which is the extranet we often browse nowwww.bitcoinmagazine.com。)
Physical Publication of Bitcoin Magazine
Later, when V God was eighteen or nineteen years old, he was admitted to the University of Waterloo in Canada (ranked 18th in the world for computer science) to study computer science. But after eight months of enrollment, he dropped out. Because he found that his mind was full of bitcoin, and he couldn't take care of bitcoin research, writing and studies at school.
After dropping out of school, V God went to Amsterdam, San Francisco, Israel and other cities for study tours, visited the Bitcoin developer community, and got in touch with some cryptocurrency projects. In the process, he gradually discovered the limitations of Bitcoin, so he wanted to find Bitcoin in Application possibilities beyond cryptocurrencies. When he was in Israel, Vitalik found that many local people were doing Bitcoin promotion work, but the concept of Bitcoin they popularized was very complicated. V God was thinking at the time, is there any way to simplify these complex protocols and how to highlight the functions of the blockchain. We know that Satoshi Nakamoto only used a complex scripting language to write the Bitcoin protocol for security reasons. However, this language intentionally limited the complexity of transactions, which also led to the failure of Bitcoin to incubate. more applications. V God believes that it would be great if we can develop a platform that everyone can use, so that developers can freely build their own blockchain applications on it.
Created Ethereum and was named V God
At the end of 2013, V Shenyou returned to Toronto after studying, and immediately wrote down his ideas into a white paper. In the white paper, he introduced the "Ethereum" project for the first time. He suggested developing a new platform using a more general scripting language. To carry the development of applications, such as social, transaction, game programs, etc., this is the later "Ethereum smart contract".
At that time, V God sent the white paper to 15 friends, and these 15 people sent it to their friends one after another. Once spread to ten, ten to hundreds, this white paper quickly spread in the Bitcoin community and received unanimous praise from everyone. The confidence-increased V God called several partners to start the deployment of Ethereum in early 2014. He invested the $100,000 scholarship he received at the time (Peter Thiel, the founder of Paypal and the first external investor of Facebook, contributed A scholarship awarded to encourage young people under the age of 20 to start a business) into the project. In addition, V God also designed a new cryptocurrency currency for Ethereum—Ether (ETH), and decided to raise funds through ICO like other cryptocurrencies.
In July 2014, the crowdfunding of Ethereum ETH was officially launched, and users can pre-purchase ETH with Bitcoin. The conversion ratio is 1 bitcoin to 2000 ethers. According to the price of 600 dollars per bitcoin at that time, the initial value of one ether is about 0.3 dollars. To everyone's surprise, the crowdfunding was a huge success from the very beginning, raising more than 3,500 bitcoins within 12 hours. After 42 days of crowdfunding, a total of 31,529 bitcoins were raised, worth 18.4 million at the time. Dollar.
As a highlight and trump card of Ethereum, smart contracts are popular among developers for their versatility and plasticity. Soon, Ethereum was recognized by most people and became synonymous with the second-generation blockchain technology. The Ethereum issued by it quickly became the second largest digital currency in the world after Bitcoin. At the same time, V God led the team to establish a non-profit company Ethereum Foundation (Ethereum Foundation) in Switzerland, and Vtalik has since been called "V God".
Through storms and crises
Smart contracts have significant advantages in terms of versatility and plasticity, but there are also some security risks. In May 2016, The DAO (Discentralized Autonomous Organization), a decentralized organization of Ethereum, completed a crowdfunding of 150 million US dollars, preparing to invest in some start-up projects in Ethereum through smart contracts. Who would have thought that this large amount of funds attracted hackers. In June 2016, hackers used the code loopholes in The DAO smart contract to attack and stole $50 million worth of Ethereum. The DAO Incident", which is also the largest digital currency theft tragedy.
At that time, after The DAO was hacked, everyone questioned the security of smart contracts, and many investors panicked. Ethereum suddenly fell from $20 to $10, and the global market value evaporated by $500 million overnight.
After discussing with the team, the 22-year-old V God made a bold decision-retrieve all the lost ether coins through a hard fork, and the stolen funds will be rolled back to the smart contract to recover User Loss. This approach is actually contrary to the decentralized and non-tamperable nature of the blockchain, but Vitalik was more concerned about the losses of investors. So this decision brought about a hard fork of Ethereum, one faction is Ethereum Classic, they choose to continue to maintain the original Ethereum; the other faction is still led by V God, they updated the Ethereum Many security flaws, continue to operate on the new chain.
In the past two years, the technology of Ethereum has matured and developed, and the status of Ethereum has been recognized by the market. From March to June 2017, the price of ETH began to skyrocket, and the market value of Ethereum once reached more than 80% of Bitcoin.
However, one wave just leveled off, and another wave rose again. In June 2017, another rumor that "the founder of Ethereum died in a car accident" broke out on the Internet, and was spread wildly by domestic and foreign media, causing the price of Ethereum to plummet by 30%, and the market value of hundreds of millions of dollars evaporated. Later, V God posted a hash value of the 3930,000th block on his Twitter to prove that he was still alive, and angered the absurd rumor with a connotative photo.
Honest Boy wants to change the world through Ethereum
God V has always been quite upright in character. He called "Aoben Cong" a "lunatic", BM, the founder of EOS who worked with him, and Sun Yuchen, who said "TRON is rubbish".
At that time, EOS, as a strong competitor of Ethereum, adopted the DPoS mechanism, and V God bombarded that this mechanism would harm the development of the blockchain platform. The two have repeatedly fought on Twitter over the issue of "POS or POW which is more decentralized". But in the eyes of BM, he and God V are actually "different skills but the same way". Although they each go their own way, the ultimate goal is to try our best to reduce social corruption and maximize social freedom.
V God, who has been a genius since he was a child, also believes that he has a mission that is different from ordinary people, especially after entering the blockchain field, he wants to really do something that can change the world through Ethereum. V God often expresses his thoughts on Twitter. He does not want Ethereum to become a bubble for speculation and wealth, but can really bring some substantial impact to the world.
For example, in 2017, Ethereum was in a stage of steady and rapid development, and the price of ETH also experienced several rounds of skyrocketing. V God warned all Ethereum users on Twitter to treat Ethereum maturely, otherwise they will withdraw from Ethereum.
V God does not want Ethereum to become a bubble under the carnival, but to penetrate into all industries and decentralize the world's economy, society, and culture. In the past one or two years, V God has been to many countries to give speeches, promote the technology of Ethereum and other related knowledge, and help people form a correct understanding of Ethereum.
Today, ETH ranks second in the global digital currency ranking with a market value of RMB 150 billion. More than 90% of the top 100 digital cryptocurrencies are built on the Ethereum platform; more than 70% of blockchain applications are also built on the Ethereum platform. Square platform. Although Ethereum may have been quite successful in our eyes, in V God’s heart, there may still be a long way to go from what he wants to achieve.
