Vitalik Buterin’s father: fiat currencies are backed by collective hallucination, just like cryptos

In a recent interview to Radio Liberty Vitalik Buterin’s father, Dmitry Buterin, tells that cryptocurrency is backed by a collective hallucination or shared faith in the asset. Same thing, as Mr. Buterin believes, happened to the United States dollar during the war in Vietnam when the Federal Reserve decided to abandon the gold standard.

This statement aside, we now also know that the father of the talented Canadian programmer worked in hardware business, moved from Russia to Canada in 1999 and has had investments in Bitcoin in the past. Sadly, those investments were on Mt Gox, which at the time looked like the most trustworthy cryptocurrency-related organization, and these initial funds were lost after its collapse.

Explaining the gist of hard forks to a correspondent of Radio Liberty, Dmitry Buterin offered to imagine if the Russian government takes the open source code of Bitcoin and launches the new “Russian Bitcoin” without the main attractive features of the original cryptocurrency - of course, the market is not going to accept and use anything like this widely.

Overall, Vitalik Buterin’s father has good understanding of the key cryptocurrency market principles and events, even mentioning CryptoKitties, the game which led to the overload of the blockchain of the cryptocurrency his son created.