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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.

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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 out in Chechnya three years later. It amounted to a double gut punch to his parents, who lost all their savings as Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down and Boris Yeltsin took charge of the rapidly changing country. Then war broke out, and his family was forced to flee Grozny. They sold their apartment for peanuts, their financial ruin sealed in only a matter of a few years. In college in Moscow, Dmitry couldn't count on help from his family. "We had to find some opportunities to feed ourselves," he said.

Along with a few friends, they devised a plan to buy Russian souvenirs like Matryoshka nesting dolls and anything cheap that sported the sickle and hammer or other USSR symbols. Then they'd make a few trips over the summer to Prague by train and then bus to sell their wares to people who would in turn sell them to Western tourists. The money they made helped them get by for the rest of the year. But perhaps Dmitry's biggest coup at the time came back to his disdain for communism.

Like all members of the Young Communist League he'd been issued an identification badge. This was the precursor to the official party membership badge that would come with adulthood. But in the immediate aftermath of the USSR's fall, an item of this order had become a hot item. He sold his in Prague for five dollars, an enormous sum at the time, considering his monthly student stipend amounted to only a few dollars. Spasiba, tovarich!

But not everything at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering involved scraping by, nations falling apart, and war-torn homelands. He met a girl, Natalia Chistyakova, and fell in love.

Founded at nearly the same time as Moscow, Kolomna is still a wild and beautiful city. It has a fortress and all the churches you'd expect, and when Natalia was a girl she'd race to get her homework done so she could run outside and play until her mother had to yell for her to come home. Her father worked in the military design bureau, her mom in a technical institute. As a six-year-old she spent many days with her mom at the lab, where - like in Grozny 1,800 miles to the south - there were rooms full of computers, each one weighing more than a Chevy.

"Some of my earliest recollections from my childhood are spending time in this lab and printing and using the punch cards and the tape," she said. These were mainframes that ate stacks of specifically ordered cards with holes punched in them to create a program. Her mom wrote code in Algol and Cobol, staples of the mid-1970s that are still in use today at some of Wall Street's biggest banks. For fun, Natalia would enter random commands to see what the computer would spit out. "We'd print large portraits of Lenin, that was a big amusement for the children," she said.

She went on to attend the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, where she first saw Dmitry, whom she calls Dima, amid a group of about 25 people in the gym. They dated throughout university and were married in 1993, when they were both 21 years old. Vitalik was born a year later, and the young family moved into a dorm dedicated to students who were married or had children. Ask Natalia what Vitalik was like as a baby and she'll laugh in the way only a mother can about her child. "We had our hands full, let's put it this way," she said. As a newborn "he was waking up every 45 seconds." By the time he was one or two "he was very stubborn and always knew what he wanted to do," she said. From early on, Vitalik had a sharp memory for what he was taught,...