Vitalik Buterin’s father: fiat currencies are backed by collective hallucination, just like cryptos
CryptoBit News Today1 min read
In a January 2018 interview with Radio Liberty, Dmitry Buterin argued that crypto and state money alike draw their value from shared belief, pointing to the dollar's break from gold. The table sets out his background, the episodes he referred to and the main claims, showing why an entrepreneur who lost coins at Mt Gox still defends the idea.
| Date | Topic | Fact |
|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Birth | Born in Grozny, then part of the Soviet Union |
| About 1989 | Education | Moved to Moscow at 17 to study computer science at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering |
| 1994 | Family | Son Vitalik born in Kolomna; Dmitry joined Arthur Andersen as a systems consultant |
| 1997 | First company | Founded Columbus Russia, a financial software reseller and consultancy |
| 1999–2000 | Emigration | Moved the family from Russia to Toronto, Canada |
| 2001 | Software business | Started Bonasource, later turned into the SaaS firm Wild Apricot |
| 24 February 2014 | Mt Gox loss | Exchange halted trading; about 650,000 BTC ultimately missing, including his own holdings |
| 2016 | BlockGeeks | Launched a blockchain education platform |
| 2017 | Exit | Wild Apricot acquired by Personify |
| 28 November 2017 | CryptoKitties | Game launched on Ethereum; at one point took about 25% of network traffic, congesting it in December |
| January 2018 | Value of money | Told Radio Liberty that crypto rests on collective belief, the same basis as fiat |
| 15 August 1971 | His dollar example | Nixon suspended dollar convertibility into gold amid Vietnam War spending pressure |
| January 2018 | Hard forks | Imagined a state-made Russian copy of Bitcoin's open code lacking its core features; predicted weak uptake |
Sources: Radio Liberty via Cryptonews, Cointelegraph Magazine, Decrypt, Wikipedia.
