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