TechFlow, April 13 — In response to the statement that "Ethereum's self-renewal requires generational and talent turnover, and the next generation must be rooted in Ethereum's values (e.g., cypherpunk)," Vitalik Buterin replied on Warpcast: "Actually, I think it's precisely during periods of application-layer growth that sound social philosophy is most needed. To draw an analogy: suppose C++ had been developed by an authoritarian, racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general-purpose, with little room for bad social philosophies to damage it (or good ones to improve it). Ethereum Layer-1 isn't quite the same: people who don't believe in decentralization won't add light clients, FOCL, or (well-designed) account abstraction; those unconcerned about energy waste wouldn't spend five years migrating to PoS... but regardless, the EVM opcodes would likely remain roughly the same. So perhaps Ethereum is 50% general-purpose. Applications, however, are about 80% specialized. What kind of applications you build depends heavily on your vision for what Ethereum applications (and Ethereum as a whole) should do for the world. Hence, having good ideas on this topic becomes crucial."
Additionally, Vitalik listed some example applications, citing Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket, and Signal as good examples, while identifying Pump.fun, Terra/Luna, and FTX as bad ones. He noted that differences in application functionality stem from developers' differing beliefs about their intended goals.
