Most people are also pretty hardwired to suspect that someone regarded as an beatific genius with unearthly powers by his friends might just be a weirdo with a few savant-like abilities surrounded by sycophants though. Which might be a hugely unfair characterisation of Buterin, but the article is much less a story about how he came about to create something, or how people are starting to benefit from stuff he's done, and much more a collection of testimony from people throwing the word genius around rather liberally. I almost burst out laughing when the author put the bit about losing millions of dollars in parentheses, as if they were worried that giving it full paragraph status might damage the financial whizzkid narrative.