At the same time, the broader Ethereum community was discussing what to do about the DAO. One thing to keep in mind is that just about everyone who called Ethereum home had bought into the DAO. The pain was spread far and wide. The community really wanted its money back.
Blockchains are constructed to be time ordered; it's crucial that the network knows that block B came after block A. Every transaction is recorded and maintained. So there are ways to change that history if a blockchain community supports such a change. That's because the network is nothing more than software that runs on people's computers all around the world. The people who spend big money to mine Ethereum and get the ether reward for doing so are a huge part of this community. If they all agree to an update to the software that addresses the DAO hack, for example, they can erase what happened. They can change history.
A less stringent approach is to blacklist the addresses known to be involved with the attack. The rest of the computer network could make it so that the ether in those attack addresses could never move, for example, nullifying its value. The first alternative I described (changing history) is known as a hard fork. Blacklisting addresses is known as a soft fork. Each option has its plusses and minuses, and the community seemed willing to go along with the soft fork approach at first.
As public support for a soft fork grew, the second attacker grew angry. He sent an encrypted message to the RHG on June 27, 2016. Here it is, verbatim, including the possibly purposefully broken English and odd syntax.
“This soft fork, and the dao-wars situation is a waste of time for everyone,” the ether thief wrote. “I'm supporting the idea that code is law at smart contract, but also the network consensus is law on blockchain.” He then pointed to the contract that had attacked the DAO on June 21, and said he'd give the money back if the RHG would as well. “Don't you do it also to see productive future?” the thief wrote.
Usually I would never know what this message said because it's encrypted, and I don't hold the private key needed to decrypt it. A person who does have the private key, however, shared a copy of the unencrypted message with me. This also meant I now knew an address associated with the second attack. I hoped it was only a matter of time until I could connect it to the original attack.
Back in Zürich, sitting across from the Swiss man with his plaid scarf and glasses, I passed him a printout of the message and asked if he sent it.
One
The clock above baggage claim at Toronto's Pearson Airport read 21:45 as Vitalik Buterin, six years old, played with a rubber ducky. A gift from the Lufthansa flight attendant on the long journey from Moscow, it would become one of his favorite bath toys in the years ahead. As the towheaded, blue-eyed boy looked around this new place, he thought about recently celebrating his birthday with his parents and grandparents in Kolomna, the ancient Russian city southeast of Moscow where the Moskva and Oka rivers meet. A few days later, when he was told they were going to Canada, he asked if it was for a week or a month. No, zaya, it's for good, he was told. Vladimir Putin would soon be president in Russia, and his parents were seeking better opportunities – as well as some adventure – abroad. There are few bigger changes in a life than moving across an ocean, and like anyone, the skinny six-year-old felt afraid of the unknown he now faced.
He carried fond, but few, memories of Russia with him. He remembered living with his grandparents while his mom and dad were busy with their careers, and as they worked out the details of an amicable divorce. His mother's parents had an apartment in Kolomna as well as a dacha where his grandmother tended a vegetable garden. The nearby forest was his favorite place to play. He remembered it being cold. One time in daycare, he wandered away from the other children who sat in a ring on the rug. His teacher came to collect him and reprimanded him for leaving the circle. In the way of a small child he thought, wait, isn't it normal for me to want to wander around?
While Vitalik had no way of knowing it then, very few things in his life would ever be normal. Now in his first moments in North America, waiting for the luggage to arrive, he only knew that the next stop on his journey would be his dad's apartment. It was a Friday in February, 2000. They took an elevator up to the Toronto apartment to meet his dad's girlfriend. Vitalik thought, again with the innocent rubric of a child, Oh cool, there's a new person in my life.
While brand new, Toronto would be where Vitalik grew up and attended school, became obsessed with World of Warcraft, and discovered a thing called Bitcoin, a new type of digital money that would propel him on a journey that only a handful of people can claim to have made.
He would change the world.
Before any of that, though, it was time for bed, with his new rubber ducky tucked under his arm.
●●●
Vitaly Dmitriyevich “Vitalik” Buterin was born in Kolomna on January 31, 1994, to Dmitry and Natalia Buterin.
His father grew up in Grozny, Chechnya, in southern Russia near the border with Afghanistan. He could read by the time he was three and a half and discovered early that he loved to play with electronics. With the limited materials he could get his hands on he built radios with blinking lights and messed around with sound. His parents had no clue as to what he was doing, and resources were tight in the Soviet era, so keeping his hobby alive was challenging. But then Dmitry got a programmable calculator with 100 bytes of memory and taught himself the machine code to make it work. It was his first computer and he was in love.
But it's a problem for a budding computer scientist if you can't get your hands on any actual computers, and that was the case for the most part in Grozny in the 1980s. “I dreamed of them because in school we didn't have access,” Dmitry said. Only in his last few years in Grozny did his class go to a local government office where they were allowed to work with the hulking behemoths of the late 1950s, the ones that take up an entire room. “Russia was way behind in technology,” he said, “but I was extremely excited to play with this and learn as much as I could.” The lack of hardware was so acute that when Dmitry won a local Software Olympiad, the work wasn't done on a computer. He wrote algorithms to solve the programming challenges with pen and paper, which the judges scored by hand.
Growing up amidst communism didn't sit well with him. He hated the brainwashing and the way that young kids were made to go into the Young Pioneers, a Boy Scout–like group, to prepare them to become party members when they were older. “By the time you're a teenager you realize nobody really believes in this, everybody's pretending and it's corrupt and just a bunch of bullshit,” he said.
We were sitting at Dmitry's kitchen table as he told me his life story. He'd just been to the gym and we'd gone to get lunch at an enormous grocery store and deli in the basement of his building in a tony part of downtown Toronto. You can see Vitalik inherited his nose from his father. Dmitry keeps his salt and pepper hair short; he is in good shape and has a tattoo across his left bicep. He wore an Ethereum T-shirt with a turtle and dolphin as part of the green and blue logo. He'd picked up a healthy lunch of salmon and steamed vegetables. As he spoke, he collected any crumbs that fell before him on the table in a tissue. By the end of our conversation he'd amassed a small pile of them next to his plate.
It was odd to think that this man, who was basically my age, had a son who had gone on to such prominence. I sat there thinking, my sons are good at Minecraft.
Still, Dmitry knew that all routes to power went through the Communist Party, such as the connections that would help ensure that you could get into the university of your choice. When a teacher advised him to make nice with the Communists so that they couldn't block him from attending the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, he reluctantly went along.
By 1989, Dmitry was 17 and had moved to Moscow to start his first year studying computer science. Two things that he could never have foreseen, however, almost blew him off course: the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and war broke