Vitalik in his father's eyes: He was called a math genius in fifth and sixth grade, and initially disdained Bitcoin

By Andrew Fenton, Cointelegraph

Original title: The Vitalik I know: Dmitry Buterin

Compiled by: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

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

“He said, ‘Hey, Dad, I’m working on this, would you be interested in checking it out?’ ” the Chechen-born Toronto resident says in his distinctive accent. Vitalik had dropped out of college a year earlier to travel the world, and within a month of returning home, he had written the first draft.

Although Dmitry introduced his son to Bitcoin two years ago, he admits that many of the details came as a surprise to him. However, he understands the broader picture.

“One of his skills is that he can take something very complex and explain it very 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 was excited.”

Satoshi Nakamoto intentionally limited the complexity of transactions on the Bitcoin network, and Vitalik's great insight 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 could only be built on top of it.

“To me, that’s a really simple analogy, right?” he said, “because I watched the development of the internet, and it started with static HTML websites, and it was all very interesting, but very limited.”

“But then JavaScript came online, and then all the other scripting languages ​​and things changed. So it was clear to me that with Ethereum, with as big a change as it was from something static and simple to having Turing-complete scripting, then the sky was the limit.”

Vitalik’s Struggles as a Public Figure

While Vitalik had the foresight to turn it into a $5 trillion cryptocurrency, explaining the concept and assembling a coalition of like-minded people to help develop it forced him to become a public figure — a role that did not come naturally. “It was actually quite difficult for him,” Dmitry said.

“I could see that, and he struggled, especially the first few years, because he had a very kind and sensitive nature. He would sometimes say, ‘Oh, now that I’m trying to do this, why are all these people building these websites that make fun of me?’”

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

“Through all the public speaking and interacting with so many people, and all the traveling that he’s done, now the world gets to see more of the Vitalik that me and his family know: this very kind, sensitive and funny guy, rather than just some smart guy with a lot of ideas who talks about blockchain and stuff.”

Back to the beginning

Now a successful businessman who semi-retired in 2017 after the sale of Wild Apricot, the SaaS business he founded, Dmitry says he saw something unique about Vitalik from very early on. Vitalik has a philosophical bent and he would no doubt add that every child 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. Although Dmitry himself was a bright child who learned to read at the age of three and a half, he said Vitalik "began reading before that."

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

“It’s clear that he has some very interesting abilities,” Dmitry said.

"And every kid with a really powerful brain has all sorts of other things going on, like nervous tics and things like that. So, there's a lot 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 threw young Vitalik into unfamiliar territory. Until then, Vitalik had been raised primarily by Natalia and Dmitry, as well as her parents.

"They helped a lot, but they insisted on not sending him to daycare. So, when he got to Canada, he had to go to daycare that taught a different language and so on. So, it was a big and somewhat painful transition for him."

The 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 interest in math, programming, and economics. Young Vitalik was able to add three-digit numbers in his head “ten times faster” than anyone else. People began calling him a math prodigy in fifth and sixth grade.

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

Like other highly intelligent people, Dmitry said, Vitalik understands the world differently than the average person, which affects the way they interact and socialize.

“When you’re smart, your mind is much better at creating models of everything and predicting different things,” he said. “And, that works well for a lot of things. But, it doesn’t work well for humans.”

"You've become too reliant on your thinking mind, and less on your feeling 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 began to break free when he began attending a private high school called Abelard School.

“I think he was successful in high school,” he said. “This private school he went to had a big influence on him, and he was really outgoing.”

But Vitalik as we know him today was literally born online. He may be listed on Wikipedia as a Russian-Canadian, but he grew up as a product of internet culture.

“He actually learned how to connect with people online and make connections and so forth,” he said. “And, that’s when he got into this whole cryptocurrency and Bitcoin space.”

“He actually built a lot of relationships online with other enthusiasts,” Dmitry said. “It’s another way for us to use our social skills, just in a very different way than in person.”

Enter Bitcoin

Dmitry is reluctant to take responsibility for his son’s success, but he undoubtedly played a key role by introducing his son to Bitcoin. His first attempt to get his son interested in hacking failed, which he describes as “how do you take a complex system and make it do something it wasn’t supposed to do?”

Part of the father-son dynamic is that whenever Dmitry is interested in something, he likes to try to pass it on to Vitalik.

"Vitalik also has a very curious mind. So throughout my life, especially as he was growing up, I was always trying to give him a lot of interesting things to see what resonated."

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

“I thought, oh wow, this does sound like a very interesting technology with some potentially big impacts. But, I can’t say that, at the time, I really had a good idea of ​​how big the impact of this technology would be,” he said.

A self-proclaimed “techno-optimist,” Dmitry has always been fascinated by technology and feeds his various interests—from artificial intelligence and futurism to libertarianism and idealism—through voracious reading.

Talking about hacking, Dmitry explained that he had not been able to get Vitalik interested in the concept because other things were more appealing. He passed him 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 itself, 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, it was a very fertile object for his brain to chew on, if you will.”

While his 17-year-old son initially shrugged off the idea of ​​a currency with no intrinsic value that was doomed to fail, he returned to the concept after he gave up his obsession with World of Warcraft when he needed something else to pass the time.

As a penniless student, he couldn’t afford to buy Bitcoin or mine any, so he started writing articles for blogs for 5 BTC per article. This led to a job as the lead writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and he worked as a research assistant for a cryptographer while taking five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo.

As a journalist, he covered the Bitcoin conference in San Jose, California, in May 2013, where the Winklevoss twins and others spoke about this new technological revolution that could be as important as the birth of the internet. Excited by the potential, he decided to embrace the opportunity with both hands and dropped out of school at the end of the semester to pursue it full time.

Dad, I'm dropping out of school.

Dmitry recalled the day when Vitalik told him about the plan.

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

"It was really funny. All three of us had very similar reactions, and we supported him because we all knew he was a very bright young man and that if he dropped out of school he would be totally fine."

“So, he dropped out of school and started traveling all over the world and got 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 played an important role in Vitalik's upbringing.

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

Dmitry explained that it's basically like Vitalik having 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 how grateful he was to have all these wonderful people in his life around him, and he said 'I have my mom, I have you Maia,' and I can't remember the exact words he used. But, you know, he was very, very sincere."