Chapter 2. Blockchain Building Blocks
Vitalik Buterin was only 19 years old when he changed the world.
Vitalik was born in Russia, and his parents emigrated to Canada when he was six. It was clear that Vitalik was a child prodigy: educators quickly recognized his remarkable talents and moved him into a class for gifted children, where he excelled in math, programming, and economics.
As a teen, the young Vitalik was introduced to bitcoin by his father, a computer programmer. While Vitalik was fascinated by the technology, he saw bitcoin not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. What if you could develop applications on top of bitcoin—essentially turning bitcoin itself into a platform?
Vitalik proposed a new kind of scripting language that could be built on top of bitcoin. (As an analogy, think of this like Android scripting languages, which make it easier for developers to create Android apps.) He was young and inexperienced, so his idea didn’t get much traction among bitcoin’s core developers, who were now the “old guard.” So Vitalik built the project himself.
Like Satoshi before him, the young developer described his idea in a whitepaper.1 He described his project, announced in 2013, as a general blockchain platform with a simple scripting language that would allow developers to rapidly create new blockchain apps. The platform would come with its own built-in units of value, its own digital currency.
Also like Satoshi, Vitalik attracted a small team of developers around ...
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