Vitalik Buterin

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I went to theAbelard school in 2008 and entered the University of Waterloo in 2012, but quickly left in order to go on a six-month journey around the world and simultaneously engage in cryptocurrency-related projects on a full-time basis. The result of the journey was the idea behind Ethereum, a concept for a generalized cryptoeconomically secured state machine architecture, for which I continue to serve as Chief Scientist.

My primary academic interest consists of studying and exploring the complicated intersection between information theory, cryptography, sociology, epistemology, politics and economics, where mechanisms such as prediction markets, cryptoeconomic state machines (for the layman: "blockchains"), security deposits, consumer protection and reputation systems, multi-key personal security architectures and sampling-and-fallback scalability games sit at the core.

In general, I am trying to move beyond just being "a cryptocurrency person" and acquiring a more holistic and long-tail perspective of what role technology can play in helping to build more secure and trustworthy systems and reduce inefficiency and waste in society; I find that individuals that identify themselves around a particular solution (eg. cryptocurrency, progressivism, authoritarianism, libertarianism, radical decentralization) are likely to be more susceptible to confirmation biases and generally less interesting than people who identity themselves around a problem, and dedicate themselves to the search for a solution to that problem no matter where the search takes them.

I also enjoy learning languages (started Mandarin a year ago) and exploring interesting places like the one that's the background of this screen.