The Infinite Machine — Summary

Vitaly Dmitriyevich Buterin’s first days in this world were spent surrounded by the bustle of university students. His parents, who were both in their fifth year of computer science programs, took him to live in their dorm room three months after he was born in Kolomna, a midsize city near Moscow, on January 31, 1994. Their small room was one of several on the same floor, all lined up and down a long corridor that led to a common area and a shared kitchen. Natalia and Dmitry would take turns taking care of Vitalik; one would watch their newborn as the other went to class or studied at the small desk by the bed.
They moved to Moscow after they graduated with hopes of finding better-paying jobs in the big city. That was 1995, and Russia was mired in an economic crisis that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union just four years earlier. Inflation was soaring at double-digit rates every month, nearly half the population was living in poverty, and productivity had sunk to levels not seen since the aftermath of World War I as many uncompetitive state companies shut down. Everything that people were used to was broken and the whole nation was trying to figure out their lives and pick up the pieces. Natalia’s parents lost their lifetime savings basically overnight because of hyperinflation.
Vitalik’s parents were relatively fortunate amid the upheaval. Natalia started working at a travel agency, which paid more than most programmer jobs and allowed her to learn English; Dmitry was a software engineer at a bank. They both moved on pretty quickly and Natalia took a job as an office manager at Heinz, the ketchup maker, and was soon promoted to the finance department. After three years there she went on to work for investment bank Renaissance Capital, also overseeing the firm’s finances. Meanwhile, Dmitry started a software company that sold accounting tools for businesses.
While his parents worked, baby Vitalik was looked after by his grandparents from his mother’s side, who had moved with them from Kolomna. His unusual talent with numbers was apparent from an early age, and they incorporated math into their games. In the seesaw and on the swing, they threw any arithmetic operation at him and he shot back the answer in seconds. By age four Vitalik’s favorite toy was the computer. It wasn’t loaded with fancy games. He just loved to experiment with different shapes and colors on Microsoft Paint and would spend entire afternoons punching in numbers and testing formulas on Excel.
By 1998, the limping Russian economy suffered a new blow as demand for oil, its main export, plummeted following the Asian financial crisis. The government defaulted on its debt and the central bank stopped defending a fixed trading band for the ruble, which caused the currency to plunge. Many companies, including Renaissance Capital, slashed expenses to stay afloat amid a contracting economy, and that meant cutting Natalia’s job.
The relationship between Natalia and Dmitry was also unravelling. They were so young when they met and had taken on big responsibilities so quickly. They started thinking about moving to a place with less economic turmoil and where they could pursue new opportunities and experience new cultures. Even as their relationship faced its own strains, they agreed they’d move to the same location, even if they were separated as a couple. They wanted Vitalik to always be close to both of his parents.
They researched countries to determine which would be the most hospitable in terms of work visas; their best options were Australia and Canada. They had never been to either but decided on Canada. It was closer, and the weather was a little bit more like Russia’s, so they figured it would be easier to adapt.
Natalia moved to Edmonton first, a city smack in the middle of Canada, where she got an accounting degree that would allow her to continue working in finance. Dmitry moved to Toronto with Vitalik one year later and Natalia moved there soon after they arrived. They decided Vitalik would stay with Dmitry so he wouldn’t have to go through so many changes.
It was in Toronto that Vitalik went to kindergarten for the first time. Back in Russia, most of the interactions he had were with his parents and grandparents. He had never been much around kids, and it showed as he hit and bit his classmates and snatched toys from their hands. Communication was difficult. While he picked up writing and anything numbers-related very quickly, learning English took him more time.
Dmitry sat with him on the floor surrounded by Legos and, as they played, spoke to him in English. As Vitalik put the colorful blocks together, Dmitry could tell there was so much going on in his brain that he wanted to express, but when he tried to, he stumbled with the words.
It was easier for him to type stuff on his computer. By the time he was seven, Vitalik still wasn’t very good at expressing himself in complex sentences, but he wrote a thirty- to forty-page document in Microsoft Word that he called “The Encyclopedia of Bunnies.” It was very technical and structured like a scientific paper, with a table of contents and charts throughout. It listed the chemical elements you would find and the math that explained how things work. Dmitry recalls it as his son’s first white paper.
Vitalik was placed in a gifted program within Canada’s public school system, and even then he wasn’t being challenged enough. His parents got him a private math tutor, a former university professor in Ukraine, who gave him more advanced material. He sat in class memorizing the formulas, going through the mandatory readings, and got high marks without putting too much effort into tests or homework, but he couldn’t see the point of it all. It was just so boring. When the bell rang for recess and everyone ran off to play sports and gossip, he stayed behind. His shyness made it hard for him to connect with other kids and make friends.
By the end of middle school his parents thought something had to change. Vitalik needed to be immersed in a more challenging environment, one that encouraged him to

speak out in class and interact with like-minded people. They decided to enroll their son in a more specialized private school, and Vitalik helped them narrow the options down to four. He spent one day in each of the four schools and decided to go for the Abelard School, with only about ten students per grade.
He was able to take advanced math classes, but also Latin and ancient Greek. He went from hardly speaking in public to joining the debate team. He was still going to his math tutor after class, enrolled in programming school on top of that, and traveled across Canada and abroad to compete in math and debate championships 1 . Trophies from those competitions now fill a shelf in his grandparents’ house. Outside of math, programming, languages, and debate, he spent hours playing World of Warcraft , where players take roles in a steampunk world populated by dragons and elves. Natalia wanted to incentivize his musical side, too, and put him in piano lessons for a bit, but that was one thing that didn’t really stick. 2
It was during this time in high school, in 2011, that Dmitry mentioned Bitcoin to Vitalik.
“Hey, this is a really interesting concept,” said Dmitry, who still had his software company and tried to stay up to date with the latest tech developments. He had come across Bitcoin somewhere online and tried to explain to Vitalik what he understood it was.
“But this does not have any real-world backing, how can it have any value?” Vitalik said.
About a month later, the term “Bitcoin” popped up again as Vitalik surfed the internet. This time he put more effort into trying to understand it. He read the technical materials and scoured Bitcoin forums until something clicked: He wanted to get his hands on some. He wanted to be a part of the Bitcoin economy. But just buying BTC didn’t feel like genuinely participating, so he decided to work in exchange for it. He went on BitcoinTalk and offered to write articles and take payment in bitcoin. The guy behind the Bitcoin Weekly blog replied, offering five bitcoins per article, or about four dollars at the time. When he managed to save 20 bitcoin, Vitalik used 8.5 to buy a T-shirt and loved the feeling of having entered a parallel economy where traditional currency and banks weren’t needed. He realized you could create a whole world, a new community, that doesn’t rely on the existing financial infrastructure.
He came up with a new business model for the Bitcoin Weekly blog, where he would publish the first paragraph of an article and then hold the rest for ransom. If the community managed to send two and a half Bitcoins, he would release the rest of the article. It worked, and he ended up getting something like $20–$40 per piece. The coins were coming in from anonymous users everywhere in the world, and that was another aspect he loved about cryptocurrency. Unlike past technological innovations cooked up in Silicon Valley garages and universities, this innovation was truly global.
In just under three short years, Vitalik had gone from Bitcoin skeptic to writing about Bitcoin to working on Bitcoin projects.
After about six months on the road, his world tour ended in San Francisco. As he climbed up and down the city’s steep hills, he continued to refine the idea of a new blockchain that could become the platform enabling any decentralized, censorship-resistant application imaginable. He made his way to Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas’s studio apartment, just south of Market Street, where he would stay for two weeks, eager to get to work.
He opened his laptop and started typing, “The Ultimate Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.”
He needed a name, so he went to look for science fiction terms for inspiration. He was scrolling through Wikipedia when he saw the word “ether,” which he remembered from a childhood science book. Ether is the disproved concept that there’s a very subtle material that fills space and carries light waves in the same way that physical matter carries sound waves. That’s how he thought of the word “Ethereum.” Vitalik wanted his platform to be the underlying and imperceptible medium for every application, just what medieval scientists thought ether was. Plus, it sounded nice.
“Ideally, this should be its own blockchain, but I don’t have the technical skills to build this all by myself,” he thought.
The obvious option would be to build it on top of Bitcoin, as Mastercoin was doing, but Vitalik discarded that idea as the Bitcoin community was mired in a heated discussion over one of the protocol’s features. Developers were getting ready to release an update to the cryptocurrency’s protocol that changed the OP_RETURN script, which allowed arbitrary data to be stored in the Bitcoin blockchain. The March 2014 update cut the amount stored in each transaction to 40 bytes from 80 bytes 3 .
This spurred heated responses from teams building on top of Bitcoin, like Mastercoin and a similar project called Counterparty, as they used the script to add functionality to the cryptocurrency—the whole point of their projects. Bitcoin developers argued a limit was necessary to prevent people from taking advantage of the free storage space and bloating the blockchain.
“It is called a free ride,” Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik wrote on the BitcoinTalk forum. “Given that the overwhelming majority—>90%—application for the bitcoin blockchain is currency use, using full nodes as dumb data storage terminals is simply abusing an all-volunteer network resource.” 4
Hundreds more posts were written, open letters were sent, articles were published on CoinDesk. Vitalik decided to avoid the drama. Also, he had no idea whether or not the community would even consider his platform to be legitimate; innovations like what he was planning were often met with skepticism and criticized by the Bitcoin community. He decided Primecoin would be a good fit for his project. It was a smaller blockchain, with fewer political conflicts, where Ethereum could be a larger part of the community.
For about two weeks in late November he only worked on the Ethereum white paper, sometimes from Stefan’s studio, sometimes from the Ripple office.
Stefan was working on building a smart contracts layer for Ripple (which he didn’t end up releasing), and was excited to share his progress with Vitalik and hear about his experience working with Mastercoin and Colored Coins. But he was a little disappointed that Vitalik didn’t talk much and kept mostly to himself.