Billionaire crypto whizz who ‘wears Hello Kitty socks’ says he’s ‘abnormal’
The world's youngest crypto billionaire Vitalik Buterin says he's "abnormal" and is rumoured to like wearing mismatched Hello Kitty socks.
But nothing has stopped the shy 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer founding the second biggest digital currency, Ethereum.
He recently made headlines for his $1 billion donation to the India COVID Relief Fund having only got involved in virtual monies nine years ago.
Charitable Vitalik then burned $7 trillion worth of one of the latest cryptocurrencies to hit the market – Shiba Inu coins.
Born near Moscow, the maths whizz moved to Canada when he was six and learned about bitcoin when he was 17 from his father.
His old man had a small software start-up and dismissed the idea of digital currencies as doomed to fail.
But it came as Vitalik was looking for his next obsession after quitting playing World of Warcraft.
He was soon hooked and started selling blog posts in bitcoin, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine when he was only 18 in the earnest hope it could help the poor.
“I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil," he told Wired in 2016.
"And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns (from the Simpson’s), sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time?"
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He still wants to “empower the little guy”.
“And personally I say screw the big guy. They have enough money already,” he added.
Mr Buterin has opened up to Wired on his experiences of social exclusion.
“I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense,” he said in 2016.
“When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius.
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"And there were just so many moments when I realised, like okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person and go have a 75 per cent average like everyone else.”
He keeps a low profile in public but is subject to a number of bizarre rumours, it was reported.
They included that he once ate a whole lemon without eating the rind, that he’s an android powered by the ethereum network and that he likes to wear mismatched Hello Kitty socks.
There’s also ones like all he owns could fit in one suitcase, he learned to speak Mandarin fluently in a couple of months and he has to ability to add three digit numbers in his head twice as fast as the average person.
Aged 21 he launched the Ethereum coin and was later granted a honorary doctoral degree from the University of Basel in Switzerland for his pioneering work in digital finance.
“If you have a smartphone then on the smartphone you have a plot key calculator as an app. You have playing music as an app. You have a web browser as an app and pretty much everything else,” he told Business Insider.
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