How it started

There was a boy called Vitalik. He liked to play World of Warcraft. His avatar was a warlock. He really enjoyed playing but then something happend. Blizzard nerfed a spell for warlocks, called “Siphon Life”. Vitalik didnt understand why they did that and cried himself to sleep. This moment was an eye opener for him. He realized that a centralize service like Blizzard (the company behind World of Warcraft) can change the rules of the game at any time. And this not only applies to games, but to all centralized services like social media, banking, etc. They define the rules and he had to play by them.

He quit playing World of Warcraft and started to learn about Bitcoin, could this be the solution to his problem?

The internet we know is broken. Because it is stateless. In a network, state refers to information or the status of “Who is who,” “Who owns what?” and “Who has the right to do what?” If you can’t hold state on the internet, you can’t transfer value without centralized institutions acting as clearing entities.

These institutions are the banks, the social media platforms, the governments, etc. They are the ones who hold the state and decide who owns what and who has the right to do what. These Centralized data structures not only raise issues of security, privacy and control of personal data, but also produce many inefficiencies along the supply chain of goods and services.

If centralization is the problem, what is the solution?