Ethereum

I actually think the growth of app layer is exactly the time that good social philosophy is needed *most*.

Analogy: imagine that C++ had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general purpose, there isn't much surface for bad social philosophy to wreck it (or good social philosophy to improve it).

Ethereum L1 is not quite in that position: someone who doesn't believe in decentralization would not add light clients, or FOCIL, or (good forms of) account abstraction; someone who doesn't mind energy waste would not spend half a decade moving to PoS... But the EVM opcodes might have been roughly the same either way. So Ethereum is perhaps 50% general-purpose.

Apps are ~80% special purpose. What apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what ethereum apps (and ethereum as a whole) are there to do for the world. And so having good ideas on this topic out there becomes crucially important.

https://x.com/owocki/status/1911160442728419681

Rereading: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/12/05/excited.html

/ethereum foundation | opinions are my own but more than likely they come from Vitalik's blog paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

Strangely, I feel like most of this is infrastructure? The only thing that normies care about from this list is stable coins. Everything else is an ingredient for something else. Even prediction markets act more like an intermediate good for news providers.