The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin invented the world’s hottest new cryptocurrency and inspired a movement — before he’d turned 20.
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I met Vitalik Buterin for the first time in Miami, during a Bitcoin conference in 2014. I had been invited by a Bitcoiner I knew in New York to stay at a beach house with a team of developers who were working on the next big thing, a technology called Ethereum. I was told it would blow Bitcoin out of the water.
Buterin and about a dozen programmers were sharing the house, using it as a headquarters for crafting their ideas. But it had become an after-hours grease trap for other conference-goers as well. This was during Bitcoin’s brief Wolf of Wall Street phase when the price was up around $800. Three months earlier—when the price was even higher—the U.S. Senate had held hearings to confront some of the regulatory anxieties borne from the cryptocurrency scene. The proceedings had gone bizarrely well. And so, early adopters had arrived in Miami flush with cash and high on a spate of good news.
I remember waking up the first morning of the conference. I had fallen asleep the night before while most everyone was still awake, bedding down with a couch pillow in some back hallway of the house, earplugs in, hoodie cinched. When I walked into the living room I found it empty of people, but blinking and whirring with technology. Extension cords snaked across the floor, looping around empty beer bottles and the legs of a whiteboard that was tagged with equations and diagrams. I tried and failed to find an outlet for my phone.
Buterin was the only person awake. He was sitting outside in a deck chair, working intensely. I didn’t bother him, and he didn’t say hello. But, I remember the impression he made on me at the time. This skeletal, 19-year-old boy, who was all limbs and joints, was hovering above his laptop like a preying mantis, delivering it nimble, lethal blows at an incredible speed.
Buterin, it turned out, was the reason everyone was there in the first place. Two months earlier, he had published a whitepaper describing an impossibly ambitious technology, one that looked beyond Bitcoin’s mission of enabling unstoppable, unmediated digital payments, and envisioned a platform for autonomous software of all kinds.
That vision has since become a rallying cry for a whole army of developers, whose involvement in the space amounts to a technological crusade for increased access, transparency, and accountability—all of which are fundamental features of any open, decentralized blockchain architecture. Their goal is to create a new economy in which anyone can participate on their own terms.
In Miami, Buterin’s army was small, but already keenly aware of the importance of beatifying its leader. Joseph Lubin, one of the developers staying at the house, and one of the few people who seemed to understand Ethereum enough to decipher its potential, told me in an endearing, paternal tone that Buterin was a genius alien that had arrived on this planet to deliver the sacrosanct gift of decentralization. Nearby, Buterin was shuffling around on the grass, looking down at the ground, muttering to himself in preparation for a talk he would give to the Bitcoin elite the next day.
Over the last two years, as Ethereum has evolved from concept to code, so too has the mystery surrounding Buterin. The resounding chorus of the people working on Ethereum is that he is to be admired and adored, and they are more than willing to contribute to Buterin’s colorful, often hilarious hagiography. I’ve been told by various people that Buterin learned to speak fluent Mandarin in just a few months, that he’s an autistic wunderkind, that all of his worldly possessions fit into one suitcase, that he once ate an entire lemon without removing the rind, that he’s an android powered by the Ethereum network.
Even those who have worked closely with Buterin seem mystified by him, as though this person is meant to be observed but not really understood.
“I saw him on the commuter train and he was wearing mismatched Hello Kitty socks,” Michael Perklin, the head of security at the Canadian blockchain consulting firm Ledger Labs, who has known Buterin since 2012, told me. “And this is the person building the infrastructure that is challenging the power structures of the most important financial institutions out there.”
A few weeks ago I met Buterin again, this time at a blockchain conference in New York. As we sat at a dining table in the Marriott Marquis, he told me how he had learned about Bitcoin in 2011 from his father, who has a small software startup of his own. Bitcoin was then two years old, Buterin was 17, and not many other people his age, and therefore in his social sphere, had any idea what cryptocurrencies were. At first he dismissed the idea, regarding a currency with no intrinsic value as doomed to fail. But then he happened upon it a second time.
Buterin won’t commit to a full explanation of why he became interested in Bitcoin on the second go around. He had recently quit playing World of Warcraft, and perhaps he was just looking for the next obsession to take its place, he says. But he does admit to having a dualistic worldview that faulted centralized powers with many of society’s sins.
“I had a much more cartoon mentality,” he says as he squeezes a lemon wedge into his green tea, then begins looping the string on the teabag incessantly around the handle of his mug. “I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns, sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time.’”
In this way, his worldview was harmonious with the vast majority of Bitcoin early adopters who fully expected the technology to operate as a stealthy foil for the status quo. And though he says he has substantially updated his binary assessment of good and evil, Buterin is still motivated by a conviction that the powerful have far too much power.
“I think a large part of the consequence is necessarily going to be disempowering some of these centralized players to some extent,” he says. “Because ultimately power is a zero sum game. And if you talk about empowering the little guy, as much as you want to couch it in flowery terminology that makes it sound fluffy and good, you are necessarily disempowering the big guy. And personally I say screw the big guy. They have enough money already.”
After researching Bitcoin, Buterin wanted to get his hands on some so he could formally join this new, experimental economy, but he had neither the cash to buy them, nor the computing power necessary to mine them himself. Instead he searched the online Bitcoin forums until he found someone who was willing to pay him in bitcoin for contributing to a blog. Every post earned him 5 bitcoins.
Buterin’s pieces caught the attention of Mihai Alisie, a Bitcoin enthusiast in Romania. The two began corresponding and eventually, in late 2011, they co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. Buterin took on the position of head writer as a side project, while simultaneously taking five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo and holding down another part-time job as a research assistant for the cryptographer Ian Goldberg, who in 2004 co-built the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol that is now widely used to encrypt instant messages.
Writing alone in his bedroom, Buterin established himself as an indispensable voice of authority with a great talent for untangling and explaining the technicalities of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.
Solitude is not a lifestyle that Buterin has chosen, but it’s one with which he’s well acquainted. In third grade, he was placed in a program for the gifted, sundering him abruptly from his friends. In the new program, he began to realize that his particular talents — a natural proclivity for math and programming, an early interest in economics, and an ability to add three digit numbers in his head twice as fast as the average human being — set him apart as an oddity. When people met up after school, they didn’t invite Buterin, and it took him a long time to even find out that extracurricular social events were a thing that happened. “I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense,” he says. “When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius. And there were just so many moments when I realized, like okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person and go have a 75% average like everyone else.”
Buterin was born in Moscow and stayed there until he was six, at which point his parents moved the family to Canada in search of better job opportunities. But he’s always considered himself to be a product of Internet culture more than anything. As he became more interested in Bitcoin, his network of correspondence grew. Apart from the few people he met at a sparsely attended Bitcoin meetup in Toronto, all of his relationships were forged online.
In May of 2013, Buterin made a trip to San Jose, California for a conference that would change everything. Bitcoiners had flown in from all around the world for the event. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were there lending the movement their brawny, celebrity flair and prescribing the community to wait with a stealthy patience. Veterans of the dotcom era drew comparisons between cryptocurrencies and the dawn of the Internet. Booths showed off new hardware wallets, merchant payment platforms, and Bitcoin ATMs. And Buterin witnessed it all as a representative of Bitcoin Magazine. The San Jose event was Buterin’s first glimpse at the living, breathing community cropping up around the cryptocurrency economy.
“That moment really crystallized it for me,” he remembers. “It really convinced me that, hey, this thing’s real and it’s worth taking a risk and jumping into. So I did.” At the end of the semester, he dropped out of college and started looking for ways he could contribute more substantially to the now-boisterous cryptocurrency movement.
A lot of people have taken that jump. I can’t count the number of people I’ve met for whom finding out about Bitcoin was like finding religion, who subsequently plunged into months of research at the expense of their sleep, their work, and their relationships, and who finally left their jobs to follow the siren call of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. But even amongst his new peers, Buterin was an exception. He’s one of a small group of people who began to look past the dizzying promise of financial gain to be had from bitcoin’s volatile market price and swelling user base to consider the more futuristic applications made possible by the technology itself.
Satoshi Nakamoto removed the third parties from both the creation of currency and its transfer by recording payments on an open ledger, called the blockchain. Maintenance was handed over to a network of unified computers, which all run interoperable software and work together, albeit competitively, to secure payments and to enforce a set of rules dictating the parameters of this new economy.
It didn’t take long for people to realize that, theoretically, you could use transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain to represent more than just money — stocks, bonds, deeds to houses for example — and that, furthermore, you could use the same peer-to-peer network that checks payments and adds them to the blockchain to enforce more complex agreements between the payer and the payee, potentially enabling a whole new genus of decentralized financial services, all of which function autonomously on the blockchain.
This level of abstraction was already a niche area of interest when Vitalik threw his hat in the ring. For six months in 2013 he bounced around the world to Israel, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas, visiting the people who were trying to stretch and knead Bitcoin into a more powerful version of itself, all the while burning through the pile of bitcoins he had amassed as a freelance blogger, which by this point had significantly appreciated in value. When he returned home to Toronto, Buterin was convinced that everyone was going about this blockchain 2.0 thing (yes, it had a name by now) completely wrong.
All the projects Buterin investigated were trying to add functionality by building layers on top of Bitcoin, which at first seems to make sense considering how much traction Bitcoin had made with users. But, while Bitcoin has the advantage of network effect, it has one huge drawback. For security reasons, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin protocol in a bastardized programming language, one that intentionally limits the complexity of transactions. Consequently, every new application that Buterin encountered amounted to a kind of hack on the system. “I discovered that they were doing this sort of swiss army knife approach of supporting 15 different features and doing it in a very limited way,” he explains.
Eventually he realized that if he wrote a version of Bitcoin that had a Turing-complete programming language, the network could deliver every imaginable digital service, right out of the box. It didn’t even have to stop at financial applications. You could replicate Facebook, reassemble the stock market, or even build completely digital corporations and run them beyond the jurisdiction of any government entity. Once placed on a blockchain, they would exist in an environment where software, data, and financial assets interact without friction.
Within a month of arriving home, Buterin had sketched his idea out into a whitepaper. And he had a name for it: Ethereum. He sent the paper off to 15 of his friends who then disseminated it further, and about 30 people reached out to Buterin to talk it over. The reception was more favorable than he had expected.
Among those who stumbled on Buterin’s article was Stephan Tual, a cryptocurrency enthusiast who eventually joined Vitalik’s team. “I got the whitepaper from Vitalik and I read it and…I fell on my bump, so to speak, jaw open, thinking, this guy is a genius and I must work for him,” recalls Tual.
Buterin waited for the negative reviews to roll in, for critical flaws to be highlighted, but it never happened.
“When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, okay this thing is too good to be true and I’m going to have five professional cryptographers raining down on me and telling me how stupid I am for not seeing a bunch of very obvious flaws,” Buterin remembers. “Two weeks later I was extremely surprised that none of that happened. As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good, fundamentally, completely, sound.”
A couple months later, the people who were really on board with the idea flew out to the Bitcoin conference in Miami, where many of them met in person for the first time. Buterin described Ethereum on stage, and the audience rewarded him with a lengthy standing ovation. When he stepped away from the podium, he was engulfed by a thicket of Bitcoiners, a mob of future addicts who were convinced that Ethereum might provide the next big fix.
In the months that followed the conference, the group of founders that had coalesced decided to fundraise through a crowdsale of Ether, the native token on the Ethereum network. They raised more than 31,000 Bitcoins from the cryptocurrency community and used the money to establish a non-profit organization in Switzerland, called the Ethereum Foundation, which has taken the role of overseeing development of Ethereum’s open source software.
(The handling of the Ether sale, however, was less of a success. All the payments were made in Bitcoin, which at the time of the sale was trading around $650. Soon after, its price crashed, and the foundation, which had kept all its profits in Bitcoin, faced the entirely avoidable loss of millions of dollars.)
Last spring, the first version of Ethereum went online. All of the Ether promised to early investors was handed out, and developers began using it to play on the platform. People in the community came together in November in London to discuss their projects.
Judging from the massive turnout, it’s safe to say that in a little over a year this technology has evolved from the dream of one person into an energetic movement that pools the talents of developers living all over the world. Buterin is no longer just writing his own future, he is building a platform that has inspired people he hasn’t even met to completely rearrange their lives and professional priorities.
I meet them all the time. A handful work at Consensys, a for-profit shop in Brooklyn that specializes in building applications on the Ethereum blockchain. The company was started by one of the original founders of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, who has a particular talent for peeling idealists away from their jobs in traditional finance. Among his employees are former alumni of Bank of America, the New York Stock Exchange, and Deutsche Bank.
Jeff Scott Ward joined Consensys in 2014. Like many in the cryptocurrency space, he remembers watching with disgust as the housing crisis of 2008 lit a match under the tinder box that was our financial system. When Occupy Wall Street took over lower Manhattan he was there. In 2014, he took a job at the New York Stock Exchange, where he got a first-hand look at the institutions that caused all the mayhem. “It’s odd because I walked at day one of Occupy Wall Street and then eventually ended up literally occupying Wall Street.”
When Ward found out about Ethereum, he immediately saw its potential for stamping out corruption. “You can’t unsee it,” he tells me. At Consensys, he now works on a triple-entry bookkeeping application called Balanc3 that provides an immutable, shared record for business invoicing, and which could therefore eliminate the kinds of fraud enabled by “cooking the books.”
“I hope to make the financial markets safer, and to dis-intermediate those who have time and time again broken our trust and have taken down the world economy without any meaningful repercussions,” says Ward.
Then there’s Joey Krug, the cofounder of a prediction market platform called Augur that allows people to make bets on the outcome of future events. Krug became interested in prediction markets while still a teenager, after reading an article by Friedrich Hayek, that touted markets as an expression and consolidation of a society’s collective intelligence. “I became interested in prediction markets for two reasons: to more accurately predict the future and to have global financial markets on anything (as opposed to being stuck with predefined markets by large institutions),” explains Krug in an email.
Although there is evidence suggesting that prediction markets — which represent the likelihood of events occurring as prices on a market — give more reliable answers than polls and even experts, in the U.S. they are considered a form of gambling and have been stymied by regulatory constraints.
In 2014, Krug dropped out of Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he was studying computer science and built a fully decentralized (and therefore harder-to-regulate) version of a prediction market first on Bitcoin and then on the Ethereum blockchain.
Others in the space are working on projects like Ujo, an application that allows people to buy music directly from artists and disburse funds to band members in proportion to their contributions, and Transactive Grid, a market for the direct sale of renewable energy. In almost all of the endeavors, the agenda is to redistribute power and economic influence away from rent seekers and back to the people who are actually creating content.
But established corporations high up in the financial food chain are beginning to take note of Ethereum as well. At that London conference last November, Matthew Spoke, a young, dimpled, senior consultant for Deloitte — one of the “big four” auditing firms that brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year — stood behind the dais and lavished praise on the Ethereum developers. “This room contains probably the greatest collection of minds working on this topic anywhere in the world right now, as far as I can tell. The brainpower in here is unbelievable,” he said, in a voice strained with sincerity.
Which leaves Buterin juggling a myriad of conflicting agendas, especially because his role as inventor is not nearly at an end. Ethereum is up and running. But in its current form it cannot sustain all of the projects that people are trying to build on it.
“There’s still technical problems. It doesn’t scale. It’s not efficient. It’s not secure. It sucks, basically. It’s shitty technology,” says Vlad Zamfir, a developer that Buterin has hired to conceptualize the next iteration of the Ethereum software.
Although Buterin has people helping him, solving all of these problems in a way that satisfies everyone involved falls squarely upon his shoulders. And the decisions are not merely technical. As has become evident in the Bitcoin narrative, finding solutions that scale blockchains and improve their security comes with political consequences as well.
While Buterin may write and speak articulately about politics, he does not seem programmed to partake in it. When he was younger, he remembers shying away from even the most standard transactions. Simply buying something in a store would be cause for anxiety, because there was always the possibility that he might make some misstep, exposing his ignorance of society’s basic principles.
As a result, he is not exactly a natural in the realm of business and negotiation. He has quibbled and ultimately split with other founders. His CCO departed last fall after a public spat. For an organization that is trying to enable new forms of governance, the Ethereum foundation is still alarmingly centralized.
But, for the time being, those who have followed Buterin down this techno-utopian path seem quite content to call him their leader.
“Everyone is currently — and I have no reason to believe this will change — happy with Vitalik as scientifically leading the project,” Lubin told me. “He’s the best person on the planet for that.”
If, in the future, someone somewhere else comes up with a better way of solving Ethereum’s problems, developers in the community say that Buterin would be the first to admit it.
“At the end of the day I know Vitalik is the kind of person that if he saw there was a better solution out there would say, that’s a better solution. He’s ultra-pragmatic,” says Tual, the former chief communications officer (CCO) of the Ethereum foundation who is now trying to encourage the growth of a sharing economy on Ethereum with a project called Slock.it.
When talking to Buterin, this is the impression I got as well. “I generally support just about every secession attempt that comes along,” he says. “If in the future there is that kind of a dispute in Ethereum, I’d definitely be quite happy to see Ethereum A go in one direction and Ethereum B go the other.” When it comes down to it, Buterin has created a technology that ordinary people can use to opt out of the traditional financial system. If they then decide to opt out of Ethereum as well, he can’t exactly blame them.
When we finished our talk in New York, Buterin immediately opened his laptop and turned to his work. In a matter of seconds it was as though I were no longer there, so complete was his mental transition. I looked around and noticed that the adjacent tables had filled up with discreet onlookers, their curious gazes casting out the invisible threads that seem to trail Buterin wherever he goes.
Before I left, I, too, sat watching him for awhile. The lemon wedge on his saucer was gone. About halfway through the interview he had popped it in his mouth and swallowed it.
