#Copy-paste bio for conferences, articles, propaganda materials, etc:

http://vitalik.ca/files/quickbio.txt

#More interesting bio

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.

In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin. At first, I was skeptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested. I started writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly initially at a meek wage of $1.5 per hour, and soon with Mihai Alisie cofounded Bitcoin Magazine.

In late 2011, I participated in a high school programming competition where players program the code for a team of simulated robots that then fight each other. I won third place. Someone asked me: what was my strategy? Others gave command-and-control strategies such as "I went for the center". I simply replied "I gave each agent a utility function and let them independently act to maximize their own objectives". That moment would inform my political beliefs for years to come.

In 2012, I entered the University of Waterloo; in 2013 I realized that crypto projects were taking up 30h/week of my time, so I dropped out. I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general - hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since

My interests include math, algorithms, cryptography, mechanism design, economics, social science, politics (I *love* pointing out similarities between governance challenges of "apolitical" crypto projects and the eternal stupidity that is mainstream geopolitics), rationalist philosophy, and the intersection of it all.

Age: 23 (for now)

Residence: Cathay Pacific Airlines

Political affiliation: Cuckservative

Drinks/smokes/drugs: green tea

Religion: crypto

Favorite pastime: countersignalling

Occupation: It's complicated