Vitalik Buterin played World of Warcraft obsessively until the developers nerfed his character and deleted his items. That betrayal made him realize centralized systems could steal from you at will. He built Ethereum so users own their assets through private keys, and no company can take them away.
I don't know if you know the founding story of Ethereum. The guy who made it, this guy Vitalik, hardcore World of Warcraft player. He was grinding like crazy. He got to level 60, which was the max at the time, leveled up his character and earned all this stuff. And then the game maker changed the rules of the game. They like changed the way the items worked. For 3 weeks he was like inconsolable. He was like just so upset. He couldn't believe it. And he found it so unjust that the game maker owned the items. It could just change the rules on him and rug pull him at the last second. And Ethereum is basically this global computer where you own your own tokens, you own your own items, you have your own private keys, and there's no company. The whole platform is designed so that the app makers could never do that to you. And he credits that as like a pretty major influence in his thinking and like sent him down a rabbit hole of like, why is the world the way it is and how can I change it?
