Compilation of the original text: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Original source: Cointelegraph

Compilation of the original text: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Dmitry Buterin recalls a day in 2013 when his son Vitalik showed him the Ethereum white paper at his home in Toronto.

"He said, 'Hey, Dad, I'm working on this, would you be interested in seeing it?'" the Chechen-born Toronto resident said in his characteristic accent.Vitalik dropped out of college a year ago to travel the world, and within a month of returning home, he wrote the first draft.

Although Dmitry introduced his son to Bitcoin two years ago, he admits that many of the details surprised him. However, he understands the broader perspective.

"One of his skills is that he can take something very complex and explain it really well," he said.

"So, even though my knowledge of Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies is only superficial, when I read this document, I was like, 'Wow, this makes sense to me.' So, I'm very excited."

Satoshi Nakamoto intentionally limited the complexity of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and Vitalik's great realization was that if he designed the evolution of Bitcoin with a Turing-complete programming language, it could potentially provide all possible digital services through the blockchain, from stock markets to building decentralized cooperatives. Dmtiry said the invention of Bitcoin was a "giant leap," and the next leap can only be built on top of it.

"It's really a very simple analogy for me, right?" he said, "because I've watched the internet evolve, and it started with static HTML sites, and it's all interesting, but very limited."

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Vitalik's struggles as a public figure

While Vitalik had the vision to turn it into a $5 trillion cryptocurrency, explaining the concept and forming a coalition of like-minded people to help develop it forced him to become a public figure — a role that didn’t come naturally. "It was actually quite difficult for him," Dmitry said.

"I could see that, he struggled, especially the first few years, because he had a very kind and sensitive nature. He would sometimes say, 'Oh, now I'm trying to do this, why are all these people building Are these mocking my site?'”

But, he added, these challenges helped Vitalik improve his emotional intelligence.

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back to the beginning

Dmtiry, now a successful businessman who semi-retired in 2017 after the SaaS business he founded, Wild Apricot, was sold, says he found something unique about Vitalik from an early age.Vitalik is philosophically inclined, he would no doubt add that every kid has something unique, but Vitalik is in a category of his own.

His birth in 1994 was a surprise. Dmitry was a 21-year-old student living in Kolomna, Russia, with Vitalik's mother, Natalia Amelineas. While Dmitry himself was a bright kid who learned to read at three and a half, he says Vitalik "been reading before that".

But great gifts come with their own problems, and Vitalik took longer than usual to get used to speaking.

"Obviously, he has some really interesting abilities," Dmitry said.

"Also, every kid with a very strong brain has all sorts of other things like catatonic tics and things like that. So, there's a lot of stuff to deal with -- they communicate differently."

When Vitalik was six, Dmitry, his partner Maia and ex-wife Natalia all moved to Canada in search of a better life.

Moving to the other side of the world throws young Vitalik into unfamiliar territory. Before that, Vitalik was raised mainly by Natalia and Dmitry and her parents.

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Fast Track to Success

Vitalik's potential was noticed early on, and by third grade he was placed in a class for gifted children, where he began to develop his interests in math, programming and economics. Young Vitalik was able to add triple digits in his head "ten times" faster than anyone else. People started calling him a math genius in fifth and sixth grade.

A seminal 2014 Wired profile described him as an autistic prodigy who learned to speak Mandarin fluently in just a few months: "It's bullshit," Dmitry noted. “It took a lot longer.” Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin (later of ConsenSys fame) described Vitalik at the time as “a genius alien who came to this Odaily to deliver the divine gift of decentralization.”

Like other highly intelligent people, Dmitry said, Vitalik understands the world in a different way than ordinary people, which affects how they interact and socialize.

"When you're smart, your mind is much better at creating models of everything and predicting different things," he said. "Also, this works well for a lot of things. However, it doesn't work for humans."

"You have become too reliant on your thinking mind instead of your perceiving mind. Your thinking mind, no matter how powerful, is going to be a mess because human emotions are far more complex than any analytical model you can imagine .”

Despite this challenge, he said Vitalik started to shake things off when he started attending a private high school called Abelard School.

"I think he was successful in high school," he said. "The private school he went to had a big influence on him and he was really cheerful."

But Vitalik as we know it now was literally born online. He might be called Russian-Canadian on Wikipedia, butHe grew up as a product of internet culture。

"He actually learned how to connect with people online and make connections and all that," he said. “And, that’s when he got into the whole cryptocurrency and bitcoin space.”

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enter bitcoin

Dmitry is unwilling to take responsibility for his son's success, but he certainly played a key role by introducing his son to Bitcoin. His first failed attempt to interest his son in hacking, which he described as "how do you take a complicated system and make it do things it's not supposed to do?"

Part of the dynamic of a father-son relationship is,Whenever Dmitry is interested in something, he likes to try and pass it on to Vitalik.

"Vitalik also has a very curious heart. So, all my life, and especially as he was growing up, I've been trying to feed him a lot of interesting things and see what resonates."

In 2011, Dmitry learned to use Bitcoin himself after hearing about it on a cybersecurity podcast.

"I thought, oh wow, this does sound like a really interesting technology with some potentially big implications," he said. "But, I can't say, at the time, I really knew how big the impact of this technology would be. ".

A self-proclaimed "techno-optimist," Dmitry has always been fascinated by technology and reads voraciously to feed his various interests—from artificial intelligence and futurism to libertarianism and idealism.

Speaking of hacking, Dmitry explained that he failed to get Vitalik interested in the concept because other things were more appealing. He passed along copies of the hacker quarterly "2600" magazine, as well as books by Kevin Mitnick, the famous '90s convicted hacker who spent two years on the run from the FBI.

"He wasn't that interested in hacking per se, but cryptography really resonated with him. You know, he read a bunch of books on cryptography and the math behind it. So when I told him about Bitcoin At the time, it was a very fertile object for his brain to chew on, if you will."

While his 17-year-old son initially dismissed the concept of money with no intrinsic value and doomed failure, he returned to it when he needed something else to pass the time after he gave up his obsession with World of Warcraft .

As a penniless student, he couldn't afford bitcoins or mine any bitcoins, so he started writing blog posts for 5 BTC per post.This led to his stint as head writer for Bitcoin Magazine, where he doubled as a research assistant for cryptographers while taking five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo.

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dad, i'm dropping out of school

Dmitry recalls the day Vitalik told him about the plan.

"I do remember the day he came back from college. In fact, his mum was visiting at our house, so when he came in, all three of us were here, myself, Maia and Natalia. And then he mentioned, 'Hey , guys, I'm actually thinking about dropping out,'" he said.

"It was really funny. All three of us reacted very similarly and we rooted for him because we all knew he was a very bright young man and if he dropped out he would be perfectly fine."

"So, he dropped out of school and started traveling all over the world and getting involved in a lot of things."

Dmitry met Vitalik's stepmother Maia in Russia "in 1995 or 1996". The two married in 2004 but separated a few years ago. He said she was instrumental in Vitalik's upbringing.

"Maia was a huge influence on Vitlaik because he grew up with the two of us most of the time, and then whenever his mom was able to visit Toronto, he would visit her regularly," he said, adding that she Then they moved nearby so they saw each other often.

Dmitry explained,It's basically like Vitalik has three parents.

"I think it was a few years ago when we were having some kind of family dinner and Vitalik was here. He stood up and said he was really grateful to have so many amazing people around him in his life," he said "I've got my mom, I've got you Maia," I can't remember the words he used. But, you know, he's very, very sincere."