23:47
I watched Vitalik grow from a nerdy kid writing Bitcoin articles to becoming this enigmatic billionaire who changes the crypto world with a few keystrokes. Let me tell you, it's been quite the ride.
When I first stumbled across his Ethereum white paper in 2013, I thought: "This skinny Russian kid thinks he can build a world computer? Good luck with that." Boy, was I wrong. The genius behind his vision wasn't just creating another cryptocurrency - it was reimagining what blockchain could actually do.
Now here he is in 2025, back in the billionaire club with ETH smashing past $4,200. But what fascinates me isn't his wealth - it's how he's remained so damn weird in an industry that usually polishes people into corporate clones.
Have you seen his cat t-shirts? Or those bizarre tweets about economic theory? The guy could be partying on yachts, but instead he's obsessing over RISC-V architecture and writing essays about quadratic funding. That's Vitalik for you.
What drives me nuts about the Ethereum ecosystem is how it's gotten so bloated and complex. Vitalik seems to recognize this too - his push to make Ethereum "as simple as Bitcoin" feels almost like an admission that they overcomplicated things. The gas fees still make small transactions practically impossible sometimes.
His philanthropy is genuinely impressive though. Dumping a billion dollars of SHIBA tokens on India's COVID relief fund? That move crashed the market but saved lives. Most crypto bros would never part with their coins like that.
I wonder if he ever looks back at his World of Warcraft moment - when Blizzard nerfed his warlock's spell - and thinks about how one game update ultimately led to creating a trillion-dollar industry. Life is weird like that.
For all his brilliance, Vitalik isn't perfect. The DAO hack, ETH 2.0 delays, and the ongoing scaling issues show that even genius has limitations. But in this sea of crypto scammers and quick-buck artists, at least he genuinely seems to care about building something that matters.
Ethereum might not end up being the final winner in the blockchain wars, but its creator has permanently changed how we think about decentralized systems. Not bad for a guy who cried himself to sleep over a video game patch.