Bitcoin has been with us for a little under twenty years, but the blockchain cryptography behind it promises to revolutionize how we govern society and live our lives… supposing ‘crypto’ isn’t all a worthless bubble.
The second most popular cryptocurrency token behind Bitcoin is Ethereum, with $220 billion held on world markets. Ethereum is a blockchain that adds some programmatic capabilities on top of the payments system invented by Bitcoin, and is the invention of young Russian computer scientist Vitalik Buterin, star of Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple’s documentary Vitalik: an Ethereum Story.
“Buterin is painfully thin, socially awkward, and an obvious genius”
Straight away it’s clear this film has a gift of a subject. Buterin is painfully thin, socially awkward, and an obvious genius, and the production has great access to him, which makes for lots of interesting background grit. Born in Russia in the turmoil of the mid-nineties, his family made their way to Canada, where six-year-old Vitalik’s use of a goodwill pc to write a deeply technical guide to magic rabbits alerted his parents to his gift with computers. We learn this from Buterin’s father, Dmitry, as he goes over a copy of the detailed papers, nodding approvingly when “the maths holds up” for a formula for magic rabbit food.
Incidentally, we are introduced to Buterin’s dad during a friendly game of chess with his son. Impressively, he resembles Street Fighter’s Zangief, implying that if Vitalik ‘the money skelly’ lifted a bit, he’d look harder than a coffin nail. All this rich coverage of Buterin at home and abroad is vivid and shows a thoughtful man well grounded by good parenting. He also resembles something of a monk, his commitment to digital nomadism and to running Ethereum as a non-profit organization making him exist in a liminal space of people’s dreary shared apartments and endless conference halls. It all makes him very relatable. Certainly more relatable than you expect from someone with a billion dollars.
"…It adds some good insight to an important figure, but it is not the film Buterin really deserved"
