This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
In the early months of 2013, while Bitcoin was beginning to capture mainstream attention as a revolutionary form of digital money, a nineteen-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer named Vitalik Buterin was contemplating a far more ambitious application of blockchain technology. Buterin had been immersed in the cryptocurrency world since 2011, writing for Bitcoin Magazine and observing the limitations that prevented Bitcoin from supporting more complex applications beyond simple peer-to-peer transactions. His vision would ultimately lead to the creation of Ethereum, a platform that would transform blockchain from a simple ledger technology into a global computing infrastructure capable of hosting entire economies and ecosystems of decentralized applications.
Buterin's path to Ethereum began with his early involvement in the Bitcoin community, where he quickly distinguished himself as a thoughtful analyst and articulate advocate for cryptocurrency technology. His work at Bitcoin Magazine provided him with a unique perspective on the evolving cryptocurrency landscape, as he documented the emergence of various altcoins, each attempting to address perceived limitations in Bitcoin's design. Through this work, he observed repeated patterns where developers would create entirely new blockchains to implement relatively minor modifications or additions to Bitcoin's functionality, leading to a fragmented ecosystem where innovation was constrained by the need to build everything from scratch.
