A World of Warcraft nerf was one of the reasons Vitalik created Ethereum

Vitalik was born in Moscow and moved to Canada when he was a kid. There he started to play World of Warcraft.

“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,”

Siphon Life was indeed removed by World of Warcraft patch 3.1.0 — “Secrets of Ulduar,” the first major content patch for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion that launched in November 2008. Patch 3.1.0 rolled out April 14, 2009. Buterin was 15 years old at the time.

At the time it was nerfed out of the game, Siphon Life would transfer 15 health per 3 seconds from the target to the spellcaster, for a maximum of 30 seconds. Patch 3.1.0 replaced that with a healing effect caused by the Warlock’s Corruption spell — they get healing equivalent to 40% of the damage done by Corruption.

“I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.”

“I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns, sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time.’"