Vitalik Buterin's Journey to Ethereum The story behind a blockchain with a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars started with a 15-year-old boy crying himself to sleep over a World of Warcraft update. In 2010, Blizzard nerfed @VitalikButerin's favorite Warlock skill in World of Warcraft. He later said: 'That day, I cried myself to sleep. It was also the day I realized the terrifying consequences of centralized services.' So, he quit the game. A year later, his father introduced him to Bitcoin. At the time, he didn’t have the computing power to mine nor the money to buy Bitcoin. So, he started writing articles for a crypto blog, earning 5 BTC per article—worth about $3.5 at the time. If calculated at today’s value, those 5 BTC per article would be worth roughly $335,000. At 17, he co-founded *Bitcoin Magazine*. Later, he applied to work at Ripple. Ripple accepted him, but the company couldn’t sponsor his visa. At 19, he proposed a series of major improvements to the Bitcoin community. The community rejected them. So, he wrote his own white paper. It was called Ethereum. Within weeks, 30 developers reached out to him. He then dropped out of university. He received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship grant. During the ICO, ETH was sold at $0.31 each, raising a total of $18 million. One person spent $310,000 to buy 1 million ETH, which at its peak was worth around $4.3 billion. Another person invested $263 to buy 850 ETH, now worth over $1.7 million. When Ethereum launched, Vitalik was only 21 years old. Its highest market cap exceeded $500 billion. And it all started because Blizzard nerfed a Warlock skill.