“Vitalik is also curious. So all my life, especially when he was growing up, I tried to show him as many interesting things as possible and see what it would mean for him.”
Dmitry Buterin recalls a day back in 2013 when his son Vitalik showed Ethereum documentation he had written at home in Toronto.
“He's like, 'Dad, I've been working on one thing here, are you interested in seeing it? '” , says a Toronto resident from Chechnya with a peculiar accent. Vitalik left university a year earlier to travel the world and wrote his first draft of documentation a month after arriving home.
Despite the fact that Dmitry introduced his son to Bitcoin two years ago, he admits that many details in the training were missed. However, Vitalik looks at things broadly.
He has one ability: he can take something very, very complicated and explain it clearly, says Dmitry.
“Even though I've only studied Bitcoin and this whole crypto engine superficially, after reading the documentation I said, 'Wow, I understand that. ' To be honest, I was happy.”
Satoshi Nakamoto has specifically facilitated Bitcoin transactions. Vitalik's great realization was that Bitcoin's evolution into a Turing full programming language would in the future make it possible to create any digital service via blockchain, from a stock exchange to a decentralized cooperative. Dmitry says that inventing Bitcoin as a “big leap” — the next one can only be made based on the results of the previous one.
“I think it's a simple analogy, you know?” , he says, “Because I've seen the development of the Internet start with static html sites that are fun but limited.”
“But JavaScript has gone online and all other programming languages have changed. So it was obvious to me that Ethereum was as important a change as moving from something simple and static to Turing full programming where your possibilities were endless.”
Dmitry also adds: “Yes, it is difficult and risky, there are security problems and so on. But you can create anything you want.”
It is difficult for Vitalik to be a public figure
Although Vitalik had the foresight to convert it into a cryptocurrency worth half a trillion dollars, the need to explain his concept to others and form a coalition of like-minded people to help develop it forced him to become a public figure — something that doesn't come naturally. “It was quite difficult for him,” Dmitry says.
“I saw that it was difficult for him, especially the first couple of years, because he is a kind and sensitive person, so to speak, in a good way. And he would say, “I'm really trying, and then these people make websites that disgrace me—why?”
However, Dmitry adds that difficulties helped Vitalik develop his emotional intelligence.
“Thanks to public speaking, interacting with a large number of people and traveling, the world saw Vitalik the way I and his family know him. A kind, sensitive and funny guy who is also smart and has lots of ideas talking about blockchain and stuff like that.”
Let's go back to the beginning
Dmitry is a successful businessman who has been working part-time since 2017 after selling Wild Apricot, a SaaS company he founded. He says that from an early age it was obvious that there was something unusual and special about Vitalik. Dmitry, a person with a philosophical mindset, has no doubt that every child has it, but Vitalik is a little different.
His birth came as a pleasant surprise in 1994. Dmitry, a student, was 21 years old and lived in Kolomna after the collapse of the USSR with Vitalik's mother, Natalia Amelineas. Dmitry himself was an outstanding child who learned to read at the age of three and a half, but, according to him, Vitalik “overtook this result” in reading.
Each barrel of honey contains a fly in the ointment, and Vitalik took longer than usual to learn to speak.
“It was obvious that he had unusual abilities,” says Dmitry.
“But every child with a well-developed brain has problems like nervous tics. There is a lot to deal with in the cases of these children — they communicate differently.”
When Vitalik was six years old, Dmitry, his new girlfriend Maya, and his ex-wife Natalya moved to Canada for a better life.
After moving to the other end of the world, Vitalik found himself in a strange and unfamiliar world. Prior to that, Vitalik was mainly raised by Dmitry, Natalya and her parents.
The quickest way to success
Vitalik's potential was noticed early, and by third grade he was sent to a class for gifted children, where his interest in mathematics, programming, and economics began to develop. Little Buterin was able to add up three-digit numbers in his mind “ten times” faster than the rest. People called him a math genius as early as fifth or sixth grade.
A 2014 biography in Wired magazine describes him as an autistic prodigy who learned Chinese as a native speaker in a few months. “But this is a complete lie,” Dmitry notes. The study took “much longer”. Vitalik's business partner Joseph Lubin (after ConsenSys became famous) described him as “an alien genius who came to this planet to share the sacred gift of decentralization.”
Dmitry says that Vitalik, like other people with a high level of intelligence, sees the world differently, and this affects his ability to communicate and socialize.
When you're smart, your mind is much better at modeling and predicting than anyone else, he says. “And it works well with a lot of things. But not with people.”
“You're starting to rely too much on rationality and much less on emotional intelligence. Your unequivocally developed rationality does not always help, because human emotions are much, infinitely more complex than any analytical model.”
Dmitry says that despite the difficulties, Vitalik started crawling out of the sink after being transferred to Abelard's private high school.
“I think he blossomed in high school,” he says. “This small private school had a big impact on him, he was very open.”
But Vitalik, as we know him today, was born online. Wikipedia says that he is half Russian and half Canadian, but he really comes from the Internet culture.
He learned how to interact with people online, build relationships and stuff like that, Dmitry says. “That's how he got into this whole crypto and Bitcoin topic.”
He met a lot of other enthusiasts online, Dmitry says. “And these are also a kind of social skills, but a little different than in person.”
Entering the Bitcoin sphere
Dmitry is reluctant to acknowledge his contribution to his son's success, but he certainly played a key role in Dmitry's introduction to Bitcoin. When he first tried unsuccessfully to get his son interested in hacking, it was something like “trying to take a complex system and make it do something it wasn't designed to do.”
“Vitalik is also curious. So all my life, especially when he was growing up, I tried to show him as many interesting things as possible and see what it would mean for him.”
Dmitry himself started studying Bitcoin after listening to a cybersecurity podcast in 2011.
“I thought, 'Wow, that sounds like a very interesting technology with potentially big impact. ' But I can't say that I knew how big at the time,” he says.
As a self-taught “techno-optimist”, Dmitry has always been fascinated by technology and has fueled his interests — from AI and futurism to libertarianism and spiritualism — with greedy reading.
Dmitry was influenced by Raymond Kurzweil, a scientist and inventor, who “wrote a bunch of books about technology development and made a lot of optimistic predictions about the future.”
“He had a huge impact on me when I was in my early 20s. I read his books and then gave them to Vitalik for him to read too. I eventually contacted Raymond through a friend and he sent me his books that I had read with Vitalik 15-20 years ago. He sent signed copies, which was nice.”
When it comes to hacking, Dmitry says he didn't get Vitalik interested in it because there were a lot of other more interesting things. Dmitry gave him copies of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine and a book by Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker from the 90s, who was convicted and hid from the FBI for two years.
“He wasn't very interested in hacking, but he was hooked on cryptography. You know, he's read a lot of books about cryptography and the payments that are behind it. When I told him about Bitcoin, it was a tasty morsel for his brain, so to speak.”
His 17-year-old son denied the concept of a currency without intrinsic value, considering it doomed to fail, but returned to it after playing enough of World of Warcraft because he wanted to do something for his time.
As a poor student, he couldn't afford to buy Bitcoin or mine, so he started blogging at 5 BTC per article. This led to a position as editor-in-chief of Bitcoin Magazine, which he took out while studying five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo and working part-time as a cryptographic researcher.
In May 2013, he was a journalist covering a Bitcoin conference in San Jose, California, where the Winklevoss twins and others talked about a technological revolution comparable in importance to the birth of the Internet. Inspired by the potential of the idea, he decided to take the bull by the horns and drop out at the end of the semester to devote all his time to it.
Dmitry recalls the day when Vitalik came to talk about his plan.
“I remember the day he came back from university. His mom came to visit, so there were three of us: me, Maya and Natalya. He mentioned in passing: “Hey guys, I'm thinking about expelling me here,” Dmitry says.
“It was interesting. The three of us reacted very similarly and supported him because we knew that he was a very talented young man and would be fine even if he left.”
So Vitalik left, went on a trip around the world and connected his life with many other things.
Dmitry met Vitalik's stepmother Maya in Russia “in 1995 or 1996”. The couple got married in 2004 but split up a couple of years later. Dmitry says that Maya played a significant role in Vitalik's upbringing.
She had a big impact on Vitalik, because he spent most of his growing up with us, and saw his mother during her visits to Toronto,” he says and adds that Natalya later moved closer, so they began to see each other more often.
Dmitry explains that Vitalik actually had three parents.
“For the most part, this is good. About a couple of years ago, I think we had something like a family dinner that Vitalik was at. He got up and said he was very grateful to have so many cool people close to him in his life. “I've got my mom and you, Maya.” I don't remember exactly what he said. But, you know, it was very sincere.”
