Vitalik: The growth of the application layer is precisely when a good social philosophy is most needed.

In response to the statement that "Ethereum's self-renewal requires generational/talent turnover, and the next generation needs to be rooted in Ethereum values (such as cypherpunk)," Vitalik Buterin replied on Warpcast: "I actually think the growth of the application layer is precisely when a good social philosophy is most needed.

To give an analogy: Suppose C++ was developed by a totalitarian, racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general-purpose, and there isn't much room for bad social philosophy to ruin it (or for good social philosophy to improve it). Ethereum Layer-1 is not quite like that: people who don't believe in decentralization would not add light clients, FOCIL, or (good forms of) account abstraction; people who don't care about energy waste would not spend five years migrating to PoS... But regardless, the opcodes of the EVM would probably be roughly the same. So maybe 50% of Ethereum is general-purpose. Applications are maybe 80% specific-purpose. What kind of applications you build depends a lot on your ideas of what Ethereum applications (and Ethereum as a whole) are going to do for the world. So having good ideas on this topic becomes crucial."

In addition, Vitalik listed some applications, considering good applications to be Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket, and Signal, and bad ones to be https://t.co/eJImNGAVxF, Terra/Luna, and FTX. He believes that the difference in application functionality stems from developers holding different beliefs about the goals they want to achieve.