Vitalik Buterin begins writing about Bitcoin at seventeen, paid five BTC per article

SEP 01 2011 · 12:15

Video: #Vitalik started as a writer in 2011 Date: 2011-09-01 · Type: bitcoin · Hub: toronto · Tags: vitalik-buterin, bitcoin-magazine, toronto, early-writing, origin-story The pieces were pedantic, comprehensive, and unbranded — a tone of voice he never abandoned. Buterin's earliest published cryptocurrency writing appeared in Bitcoin Weekly beginning around September 2011, while he was finishing secondary school in Toronto. The payment arrangement was almost incidental — five BTC per article — but it mattered: by late 2013, as Bitcoin's price climbed toward a thousand dollars, those accumulated coins had become enough to fund a dropout and a year of travel. He had been born in Kolomna, in the Moscow Oblast, in 1994, and brought to Canada at five; he won bronze at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2012 while simultaneously writing obsessively about a protocol most of his schoolmates had not heard of. When Mihai Alisie put out a call on BitcoinTalk for collaborators on a print magazine in 2012, Buterin was the obvious co-founder — he had already published more sustained technical writing on Bitcoin than almost anyone else in the English-language space. Bitcoin Magazine's first print issue appeared in May 2012 and served as the connective tissue of an early international Bitcoin community that existed largely in archipelago: Alisie in Bucharest, Buterin traveling. The working relationship became the personal backbone of Ethereum two years later. The boldest thing about this period wasn't the precocity — it was the register. Buterin wrote as though Bitcoin were an object of serious intellectual inquiry rather than either a get-rich-scheme or a libertarian totem. That meant his writing aged unusually well and attracted readers who would have flinched at evangelism. The whitepaper he distributed in late 2013 reads like a very long Bitcoin Magazine piece: same dense explanatory patience, same refusal of hype. Facts • First piece for Bitcoin Weekly: approximately September 2011 • Payment: 5 BTC per article — a sum that appreciated dramatically by late 2013 • Born January 31 1994, Kolomna, Moscow Oblast; emigrated to Canada 1999 • Won bronze at International Olympiad in Informatics, 2012 • Left University of Waterloo in 2014 with a Thiel Fellowship ($100K) • Bitcoin Magazine co-founded with Mihai Alisie; first print issue May 2012 Primary Documents • Vitalik Buterin's Bitcoin Magazine archive — https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/vitalik-buterin • Vitalik Buterin personal site — https://vitalik.eth.limo/