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

On April 13, PANews reported that in response to the statement "Ethereum's self-updates require generational/talent turnover. And the next generation needs to be rooted in Ethereum values (such as crypto punk)", Vitalik Buterin replied on Warpcast: "I actually think that the growth of the application layer is exactly when good social philosophy is most needed. For example, suppose C++ was developed by an authoritarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is universal 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 entirely like this: people who don't believe in decentralization won't add light clients, FOCIL or (well-formed) account abstractions; people who don't mind wasting energy won't spend five years migrating to PoS... but anyway, EVM opcodes are probably roughly the same. Therefore, about 50% of Ethereum might be generic. About 80% of applications are specific. What kind of application you build largely depends on your ideas about what Ethereum applications (and all of Ethereum) will do for the world. So having good ideas on this topic becomes crucial."

In addition, Vitalik listed some applications and believes that good ones include Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket and Signal while bad ones include Pump.fun, Terra/Luna and FTX. He believes that differences in application functionality stem from developers holding different beliefs about their goals.