Your assumption of his naiveté is quite charitable. Before becoming the mouthpiece/patsy for ETH he was doing a quantum computing scam. He claimed he was going to compute NP problems in P time by simulating a quantum computer in software. Absolute hogwash obviously

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/

A more cogent explanation is that Vitalik finally found the right way to pull a con.

Huh, interesting. But in 2013 he was 19 years old. I'm not willing to ascribe such malice to a 19 year old for something like this.

What catalyst between 2013 when he was attempting to fleece gullible elderly angel investors with nonsense CS talk and 2014, when he began doing ETH, transformed him from a scammer to a legitimate and responsible financial planner?

I'm willing to accept that people's actions from when they're 19 shouldn't color their lives years later. But maybe people's actions when they were 19 are good to examine to put context into a project they began when they were 20.

Ridiculous argument. Are you saying children are incapable of malice?

Perhaps they are not capable of understanding why you cannot simulate a quantum computer with a classical computer.

Sometimes even smart people are wrong about stuff, that doesn't make them necessarily malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Alchemy

If he beat someone to death with a hammer, sure. If he unreasonably thought he was going to invent a mathematical breakthrough? No.

He's choosing to use his talents this way