Buterin, V. (2013). A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.

17-year-old Vitaly Dmitriyevich "Vitalik" Buterin co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 after learning about the cryptocurrency from his father, a computer scientist. Three years later, with support from the Thiel Fellowship, Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo to work on Ethereum full-time.

Buterin initially proposed to augment Bitcoin with the ability to run a programming language, turning it into a decentralized general-purpose computer. The idea failed to gather support from the Bitcoin community, and Ethereum was born as a new platform.

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