Ethereum Creator Went Into Crypto After His WoW Character Got Nerfed

Ethereum, and the cryptocurrency Ether, is pretty ubiquitous these days in the world of blockchain. But its creation can be traced back, sort of, to the Blizzard MMO World of Warcraft. And more specifically, a nerf to a Warlock skill all the way back in 2010.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, explains in his bio that he was a player of WoW from 2007 to 2010. In that final year, “Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell”. This ends up being the trigger in helping Buterin realise “what horrors centralised services can bring”.

And that put Buterin on the blockchain path, starting with writing for a blog called Bitcoin Weekly, and later cofounding Bitcoin Magazine. He even dropped out of university to focus on his crypto projects, which were “taking up 30 hours a week” of his time. And thus Ethereum was born.

There’s a nice dose of irony to the whole story as well. After all, Ethereum is a faction of the Ethereal race in WoW. And yet, here we are, with the tech named after an element in the game. For those who know the story, it will now serve as an eternal reminder of where the name came from.

Someone In Japan Got Arrested For Selling Modded Breath Of The Wild Save Files

Back in February, we saw reports of a man getting arrested in Japan for selling hacked Pokemon for the franchise’s latest instalments. More recently, someone just got caught doing something similar, but for another Nintendo IP. Said person was caught selling modded save files for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The Broadcasting System of Niigata reports that a Tokyo resident was detained on 8 July for said offence. Originally, the modded save data was put up in an auction site in April for JPY3500 (~RM133). The listing was dubbed “the strongest software”, with boosted stats and rare items that would be tricky to obtain via normal gameplay.

Though the person was caught selling modded save files for Breath of the Wild, it wasn’t the only game he was modding saves for. The report states that he also admitted to doing the same for other games, earning JPY10 million (~RM380000) since December 2019.

The man is charged under Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention law, under which modding of save files isn’t illegal. But it immediately steps outside legal realms once the modded save files start going on sale. And as we saw previously, Nintendo is very quick to take action when it comes to its own IPs.