The epic journey of young Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum

2013 was a watershed year. At that time, Bitcoin had been crowned as digital gold, but the limitations of its scripting language seemed to confine blockchain to the single mission of bookkeeping. It was at this moment that a 19-year-old Russian-Canadian teenager, Vitalik Buterin, sounded the bell for a new era with a white paper on Ethereum. What he envisioned was not a faster currency, but a world computer.

This genius, obsessed with mathematics and programming, has already emerged in the Bitcoin community. But he is not satisfied with that. He envisioned a blockchain with a built-in programming language for smart contracts, allowing anyone to build decentralized applications (DApps) on this foundation. This idea is groundbreaking; it aims to push blockchain from the narrow field of finance into the infinite space of supporting human social collaboration.

Crowdfunding Launch Collective Construction of Dreams 2014-2015

Unlike the mystery surrounding Satoshi Nakamoto, Vitalik Buterin chose openness and collaboration. In 2014, the Ethereum project raised approximately $18 million through its ICO, marking not only a crowdfunding of funds but also a crowdfunding of wisdom and ideals. Developers and dreamers from around the world were attracted by this vision and gathered together. On July 30, 2015, the Frontier version went live, officially launching the Ethereum network. Although this world computer had a rough interface and was difficult to operate, it finally began to run.

Trial by Fire DAO Event and Philosophical Choices 2016

A true legend must undergo the baptism of fire. In 2016, The DAO, the largest crowdfunding project based on Ethereum, was attacked due to a vulnerability in its smart contract, putting over $50 million worth of ETH at risk of being stolen. The community was divided between the purest adherence to the principle that code is law, allowing funds to be lost, or intervening to implement a hard fork to roll back the transactions.

The young Vitalik Buterin was under immense pressure and ultimately chose the latter. He understood that sometimes painful compromises must be made between ideals and survival. This hard fork successfully recovered the funds but also led to a permanent split in the Ethereum community, with the original chain continuing as Ethereum Classic (ETC). This crisis did not crush Ethereum; instead, it taught it to seek balance in decentralized governance and become more resilient.

Ecological Outbreak and Congestion Troubles 2017-2020

With the popularity of the ERC-20 standard in 2017, Ethereum experienced its first ecological explosion. Thousands of projects raised funds through ICOs, starting a frenzy of coin creation. However, success quickly revealed the bottlenecks of the initial design, as applications like Cryptokitties became popular, the issues of network congestion and skyrocketing Gas fees became evident. This world computer is still too slow and too expensive.

In the face of skepticism, Vitalik Buterin did not become complacent. He had long foreseen this day and launched an ambitious upgrade roadmap – Ethereum 2.0. This is a complete revolution of its foundation, aimed at transitioning from the energy-intensive proof of work (PoW) to the efficient and energy-saving proof of stake (PoS), and achieving a thousandfold improvement in performance through solutions such as sharding technology.

The Merge: A Silent Earth-Shattering Transformation 2022

After years of careful preparation, on September 15, 2022, Ethereum completed the most important upgrade in history - The Merge. No downtime, no turmoil, Ethereum quietly switched from a PoW chain to a PoS beacon chain in the silent world of code. At this moment, Ethereum's energy consumption was reduced by about 99.95%, laying the foundation for its sustainable future. This is also a victory for Vitalik Buterin's philosophy of achieving global consensus through rigorous cryptography and economics, rather than pure computational power competition.

The Future Path: Climbing the Peak of Surging Cleansing and Extravagance

The merge is just the beginning, not the end. Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum community have long set their sights on the further trilogy, with Surge introducing sharding to enhance scalability, Scourge addressing MEV issues to ensure fairness, and Splurge carrying out various optimizations. This journey is long and arduous, but every step points towards that original dream – to build a truly decentralized world computer capable of supporting applications at a global scale.

The legend of Vitalik Buterin lies not in how much wealth he has created, but in the seemingly fantastical idea he had at the age of nineteen, which is gradually being transformed into reality by him and a global community. He has grown from a young man who proposed smart contracts into a thought leader guiding the development of the entire ecosystem. His story tells us that true power does not come from control, but from inspiring the collective wisdom of an era to collaboratively build a more open, fair, and efficient future. The journey of Ethereum itself is one of the greatest smart contracts in the history of human collaboration.
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