From the man himself. (I seem to have gotten the banning thing wrong, but same point overall) https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin

From the man himself. (I seem to have gotten the banning thing wrong, but same point overall) https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. 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. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit." And a brief mention on Wikipedia on the other point: "Ethereum was first described in Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language."