Vitalik: Building applications depends on developers' vision, and application-layer growth requires strong sociopolitical support

BlockBeats News, April 13th, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to the "community's need for self-renewal of Ethereum requiring generational turnover, with the next generation needing to be rooted in Ethereum's values (e.g., cypherpunk) as a reply:

"I actually believe that the growth of the application layer requires good social philosophy support. For example: suppose C++ was developed by an authoritarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general-purpose, with not 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: those who don't believe in decentralization won't add light clients, FOCIL, or (well-formed) account abstraction; those who don't care about energy waste won't spend five years migrating to PoS. However, the EVM's opcodes may be roughly the same. Therefore, Ethereum might be about 50% general-purpose. Applications are about 80% specific. What kind of application you build largely depends on your idea of what Ethereum DApp (and the entire Ethereum) will do for the world. Therefore, having good ideas on this topic becomes crucial."

Vitalik listed some examples of applications, considering good applications like Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket, Signal, and bad applications like Pump.fun, Terra/Luna, FTX, with the difference stemming from developers' different beliefs in their goals.