World of Warcraft Inspired Ethereum

A story about how Vitalik Buterin's negative experience with World of Warcraft influenced him to create Ethereum.

"The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, was a hardcore World of Warcraft player. He grinded like crazy and got to level 60, which was the max at the time. He had leveled up his character and earned all this stuff, but then the game maker changed the rules of the game where they changed the way the items worked. Some of his character items that he had worked so hard for got taken away.

For 3 weeks he was inconsolable. He found it so unjust that the game maker could just change the rules - he didn't own his items, the game maker owned the items and could rug pull them at the last second.

This experience led him to create Ethereum, which is basically this global computer where users own their own tokens and items through private keys. There's no company that can change the rules on you - the whole platform is designed so that the app makers could never do that to you. He credits that World of Warcraft experience as a major influence in his thinking and sent him down a rabbit hole of questioning why the world is the way it is and how he could change it."