Today, there's a blockchain valued at $255 billion, all because a gaming company nerfed a spell and made a teenager cry.
Back in 2010, a 16-year-old Vitalik Buterin logged into World of Warcraft and found that the devs had stealthily removed his favorite Warlock ability.
Years later, he penned his thoughts on it.
His exact words were: "I cried myself to sleep, and that day I realized the horrors that centralized services can bring."
He quit the game and never looked back.
A year later, his dad introduced him to Bitcoin, but he couldn't afford any and had no way to mine it.
So, he started writing articles about crypto for a blog.
He got paid 5
$BTC per article, which back then was about $3.50.
Each of those 5 BTC is worth around $385,000 today.
He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine at the age of 17 and applied for a job at Ripple when he turned 18.
They accepted him, but couldn't sponsor his visa.
At 19, he proposed significant upgrades for Bitcoin. The community shot them down.
So instead, he wrote his own whitepaper. He called it Ethereum. Within weeks, 30 developers reached out to him.
He dropped out of college and got a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. He sold
$ETH at $0.31 during the ICO, raising $18 million.
One person invested $310,000 for 1 million ETH in that sale. At ETH's peak, those coins were worth $4.8 billion.
Another person put in $263 and got 850 ETH, which is now worth over $1.7 million.
#Ethereum launched when Vitalik was 21. It's currently valued at around $255 billion.
A game developer removed a spell from a character class that made a teenager cry, and then built the second-largest blockchain in history.
#wow #VitalikButerin #Ethereum