What it takes for a developer to reach the billionaire status? Well, some of the most rich people today used to be programmers. Musk, Gates, Zuckenberg, all of them were coding in basements, or in their parents room, well before they managed to reach businessmen status. In fact the stocks of their companies made them rich and the business management skills along with a healthy corporal environment allowed them to reach billionaire status.
Vitalik Buterin one of those devs, and studying him gives us an image of a person that was always driven by success. There are more that reached into billion dollar mark within crypto and I think the earliest are Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan with their Bitmain mining farm. I don't know exactly about Roger Ver, but he has made some great investments very early and deserves to be named even if he hasn't reached this level (at least not yet).
I remember watching documentary about Bitmain years before I first used and invested crypto. I felt that these guys were risking too much, but they looked like having a lot in mind.
I read a lot about Vitalik Buterin lately, how he was in crypto during times that was just a handful of people working by writing code. The devs were responsible for everything, from marketing videos to creating any concept possible. Vitalik was even an editor at Bitcoin Magazine.
Then the big guys came and seem to taken this market to a next stage, and in just 3-4 years it was the beginning of what is now growing to take over the financial system.
Vitalik's top quality is foresight. He is a visionaire and while in his beginning he promoted some very controversial developments as a supposed quantum supersomputer he was creating, (got funded for it and also accused of running a scam), he also knew that the cryptocurrency space in 2011-2012 was the best time to enter.
There used to be in the field another controversial persona called Zhou Tong. At a very young age he created the first Bitcoin derivatives exchange called Bitcoinica, which immediately found to be trading millions of dollars in volumes but was also hacked multiple times, eventually leading to its shutdown. Zhou Tong stepped away and decided to quit crypto completely. Vitalik though, had this thing to connect with those great minds of his age, and wanted tried to convince Tong that leaving too early would be a mistake. He knew that this was not a time for anyone to leave, since they were going to miss so much.
Vitalik holds most of his Ethereum from the beginning, but he has also sold enough to live as a wealthy person. He is a billionaire, but Ethereum is not able to serve for payments.
Maybe there will be a service that accepts Ethereum (or Bitcoin, or Bitcoin Cash) to buy some items, perhaps a Rolex, or even a car and a home, but this is not even 1% of the business accepting any kind of crypto. And this is more than ten years now, we see this growth in new investors but we don't see the same increase in users.
Something to consider since having billions but without the ability to spend, means you have to sell first, making Ethereum look like a stock. Is it that crypto are today the stocks of the past, but not the currencies of the future?
Maybe before the Covid economy this wasn't applicable, but what about the after Covid economic shock and effects of the mindless printing spree by the Central Banks? Are the valuations of these companies based on fundamental analysis when all indicators are out of the question anymore? I see today people still trying to barter for a few dollars, and thinking how pointless this is during these times. The $1 saved today is not a dollar earned, it seems that it is a lot less.
