Who is V God?

The real name of "Vitalik Buterin" is Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum and a real bigwig in the blockchain industry.

Born in Russia on January 31, 1994, Buterin immigrated to Canada with his parents when he was 6 years old. His father was a computer scientist, so he was exposed to computers from an early age, and in elementary school, he was selected to the Distinguished Children's class and realized that he was full of interests in mathematics, programming and economics. In 2012, he won a bronze medal at the International Informatics Olympiad. From the most traditional point of view, V God is a genius boy.

In the blockchain world, Buterin's first role is that of an author, who writes articles discussing Bitcoin and blockchain.

At the age of 17, Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father. After meeting some people on forums, he was invited to write for a bitcoin blog, and at the time, he could get 5 bitcoins ($3.50 worth) for writing an article. Sadly, the blog site was quickly shut down as very few people were following Bitcoin at the time.

In September 2011, Buterin co-founded a website called Bitcoin Magazine with friends he met online, where he is the co-founder and lead author. At the end of 2012, the outlet also started publishing a print magazine, becoming the first magazine to report on cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Magazine was later acquired by media agency BTC Media, and Buterin continued to write about it until mid-2014.

In the blockchain world, Buterin soon had a second role, a programmer who did blockchain planning and development.

In 2013, Buterin traveled around the world. He stayed in China for a while. His Chinese is also very good. He often communicates with Chinese netizens in Chinese on forums. During this time, he traveled around the world to meet friends he met online to talk about bitcoin systems and blockchain programming.

Around this process, he came up with the idea to do a project called "Ethereum". He believes that a scripting programming language should be developed for Bitcoin so that applications can be developed on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, his ideas could not be accepted by the Bitcoin community. So he started thinking that maybe he should develop a new platform with a scripting programming language.

In late 2013, after returning to Toronto, Canada, he published a paper in the form of a white paper, "Ethereum: The Next Generation of Smart Contracts and Decentralized Application Platforms." After analyzing the design, advantages and disadvantages of the Bitcoin system in detail, he proposed to build a new blockchain to make it a platform for decentralized applications. The title of the Ethereum white paper is: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform; it is available at: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper.

The idea of ​​decentralization took root in his mind early on. At the age of 13, Buterin became addicted to the "World of Warcraft" game, but then something happened that made him very angry. Blizzard, which developed the Warcraft game, canceled Warlock's "Life Siphon" skill. He wrote an email and communicated with Blizzard's engineers in the forum to try to restore this skill, but the reply was that we did it out of game balance. done, cannot be recovered. Buterin recognized that players are vulnerable, and game developers like Blizzard are the center, and it has the final say.

Later, in the preface written for "Commercial Blockchain", Buterin referred to the technological wave that he and Ethereum were in as "decentralized technologies". He wrote: “Rather than relying on the honesty of the other side we are dealing with, it is better to build a technological system that can endogenously include what we want. This way, the system itself can keep functioning even if the actors inside are corrupt. , to get the effect we want.”

Buterin once studied at the University of Toronto for 8 months, but after receiving a 100,000-yuan Thiel scholarship from Facebook's early investor Peter Thiel, who encouraged him to drop out of school and start a business, he began to develop the Ethereum project full-time in 2014, and has since established a legend.

Starting from the white paper in 2013, the Ethereum project has undergone more than 4 years of development, and finally exploded in 2017: the number of tokens based on it has skyrocketed, and the price of Ethereum's own fuel currency "Ether" has risen in one year. It has risen more than 170 times in time, from $8 at the beginning of 2017 to nearly $1,400 at the end of the year.

Buterin has since had a third role in the blockchain world - a technical leader.

Buterin leads the development of the Ethereum system, and also drives the development and application of the entire blockchain technology. In Chinese online forums, netizens called him from "V Sheng" to "V God". After the mysterious Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto completely disappeared from the network, Buterin became the most important figure in the blockchain field.