Dmitry Buterin is a self-made millionaire who fathered a billionaire who created a cryptocurrency that’s on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar a
Dmitry Buterin is a self-made millionaire who fathered a billionaire who created a cryptocurrency that’s on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar asset.
Suffice to say the possibility that Buterin would found three multi-million dollar businesses and retire in his 40s was beyond his wildest imaginings growing up in Grozny, Chechnya in the former Soviet Union during the 1970s.
“Of course not,” the Toronto resident says in a still quite prominent accent. “Because in the Soviet Union, when you retire, you’re pretty much close to death. And everybody is more or less equally poor. And you just basically sort of survive.”
@BlockGeekDima is a familiar figure on Crypto Twitter, amassing 31,000 followers and offering a playful and thoughtful take on the petty infighting and maximalism in the space. Quite apart from fathering Vitalik, he also introduced his son to Bitcoin, setting in motion the sequence of events that led to the creation of the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency.
Buterin shares custody with his ex-wife Maia of their two daughters Misha, 13 and Katya, 10. Considering his first experience with children was raising a super genius, it must be a very different experience raising more normal kids.
“When Vitalik was born, I was 21 years old, still in university and working full time and the Soviet Union was falling apart around me,” he says. “I’m much older, [it’s a] different environment, different child, everything is different.”
“I was the best that I could have been in circumstances that existed back then. But yes, I am a very different dad now than I was when I was 21.”
Despite growing up under communism, Buterin went on to become a model capitalist, with his most successful venture the software as a service company Wild Apricot. He also co-founded blockchain education resource BlockGeeks.com and is an enthusiastic participant in the crypto space.
This is how half a trilly started.
Looks healthy and will likely grow to a full trillion and beyond pic.twitter.com/I57jVibLom— Dima ButΞrin (@BlockGeekDima) May 12, 2021
Creating the creator
While he passed on his interest in technology to Vitalik and gave him the first push toward cryptocurrency, he’s reluctant to claim any credit for his son’s success.
“People quite often tell me ‘Oh you must be so proud of Vitalik’ and in a way I am but every human being is an outcome of so many factors such as the humans around him, his genetics, the environment. And I am one of those factors, right? But why is ‘me’ the way that I am? I’m the influence of another million factors.”
“So for Vitalik, to have invented Ethereum, all of the things in the universe had to be the way they were for that to happen. So, this is kind of my fundamental view of life.”
Buterin often answers the simplest of questions with a philosophical treatise. It’s who he is these days.
“If you saw my Twitter, you will find that you will not be surprised to find a lot of my answers are pretty philosophical. Because that is really the nature of the way I think about the world nowadays.”
Buterin has always been a voracious reader, mainlining information through books as a child thanks to his own parents who built up an extensive home library at a time and place when books were a luxury.
His interests and obsessions change and develop from science to electronics, computing, futurism, libertarianism and cybersecurity. For a while, he was fascinated by “entrepreneurship, human psychology, and personal development” before he moved on to “spirituality, which is a very broad term, which can mean so many different things to people. That’s been my interest maybe in the last 10-15 years.”
“It’s really an attempt to answer the most important questions. What is you? What is me? What is being human? Consciousness. What is happiness? What is love? What’s God?”
Following in the footsteps of people like the famed psychologist Timothy Leary, who began researching psychedelic drugs at Harvard when he was in his 40s and became an advocate for consciousness expansion via LSD, Buterin has also become interested in turning on and tuning in.
“My first ever experience with this when I was 42, after reading Sam Harris and then realizing that maybe I’ve been brainwashed and sold a bag of bullshit by the government all of my life,” he says, adding that he spent an entire year researching psychedelics before deciding he wanted to try them.
“So eventually, I did my first experiment when I was 42 years old — that was LSD. Then, I tried mushrooms later on when I was 43 and then I had a whole bunch of experiences, which really also affected my view of the world, the consciousness of the world and everything. So, I would say that they were one of the important factors on my life path.”
Tinkering with computers
Born in 1972, Dmitry Buterin…
cointelegraph.com