Part of Cointelegraph’s Crypto Stories on YouTube, this series highlights the power of cryptocurrencies in changing people’s lives around the world.
The latest episode of Cointelegraph’s Crypto Story features never-before-seen audio from an exclusive interview with Vitalik Buterin, recorded at a conference in Hong Kong in 2014. In this short animation, viewers You can learn about the origin story of Ethereum (ETH), the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, directly from the founder himself.
Back in 2011, when Buterin was a student at the University of Waterloo, he first heard about Bitcoin from his tech entrepreneur father. However, he did not take decentralized currency seriously until he started participating in Bitcoin forums created by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Buterin said that in Buterin’s own quest to learn about Bitcoin, he became a writer for the now-defunct Bitcoin Weekly internet site, where he was paid 5 BTC per article, or 4 dollars at that time.
Related: Finance Redefined: Vitalik Cuts Cross-Chain, Decentralized dYdX, Jan 7-14
He next exercised his newfound journalistic skills to join Mihai Alisie in co-founding Bitcoin Magazine. Their first issue was published in May 2012, according to the publication’s internet page, and the magazine is now owned by BTC Media.
Buterin decided to withdraw from her university studies in 2013 at the age of 19 to pursue full-time working on blockchain-related projects while traveling the world. During this time, he realized that cryptocurrency can be used for “more than money” and should allow for more “freedom.”
Buterin’s dream was to develop a blockchain with a built-in programming language and thus Ethereum was born, with the help of Mihai Alisie and others. The project was officially announced in January 2014.