So of course the biggest face in Ethereum is Vitalik Buterin.
He created Ethereum, and also co-founded the Bitcoin Magazine, both when he was under 20 years old.
Some people argue that he represents a point of centralization behind Ethereum.
He’s the personality driving Ethereum forward, and he’s a pretty likable guy, but what happens when he steps aside? His opinion can very easily shape the entire space, and he controls a lot of influence.
Actually, just recently (5/23/18), Vitalik posted on Twitter that Google had reached out to him to try to hire him for a top secret blockchain project.
This is interesting especially since Google banned cryptocurrency and ICO ads on their search engine earlier this year.
Vitalik didn’t take the job, and instead made a poll on Twitter on whether or not he should take the job as a joke.
Vitalik currently leads Ethereum’s research team, which contains another key player: Vlad Zamfir.
Vlad is very outspoken and is a self-proclaimed troll, and often times disagrees with Vitalik: making for a culture of healthy debate within the space.
Notably, Vitalik and Vlad have different visions for Ethereum’s upgrade to Proof-of-Stake, an alternative consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Work.
We’ll explore this in our second course.
Gavin Wood is a co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum, and is famous for originally proposing Solidity as a high level programming language on top of the EVM.
He’s the current CTO and Chairman of Parity technologies, which recently has been famous for the Parity wallet hacks.
Nick Szabo is a researcher in digital contracts and digital currency.
He is known for designing Bitgold way back in 1998, and also for coining the term “smart contract.” Being an academic with quite a large internet presence, his articles are particularly useful.
Andreas Antonopoulos is the author of Mastering Bitcoin, which is an optional text for this course.
He’s an author, educator, and speaker.
He’s also known for coining the term “Internet of Money”, writing two books called The Internet of Money (volumes 1 and 2) and also Mastering Ethereum.
Joseph Lubin was a co-founder of Ethereum.
He also founded ConsenSys, which is a company that made great strides in developing the Ethereum ecosystem.