From Warcraft to Ethereum

I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized that horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit. In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin. At first, I was skeptical, and did not understand how it could possibly have value without physical backing. But slowly I became more and more interested. I started writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly initially at a meek wage of $1.5 per hour, and soon with Mihai Alisie cofounded Bitcoin Magazine. In 2012, I entered the University of Waterloo; in 2013 I realized that crypto projects were taking up 30%/week of my time, so I dropped out. I went around the world, explored many crypto projects, and finally realized that they were all too concerned about specific applications and not being sufficiently general - hence the birth of Ethereum, which has been taking up my life ever since.

A young Vitalik Buterin stands outdoors beside a long autobiographical account of his path from playing World of Warcraft to cofounding Bitcoin Magazine and creating Ethereum. The joke is the absurdly grand origin story: a minor change to a video game spell supposedly inspires a life-changing rejection of centralized services and the birth of Ethereum.

• @jeppa420 / 26929 2022-07-21