Vitalik Buterin says the app layer needs ‘good social philosophy’ most

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues it’s Ethereum’s application layer, not its infrastructure layer, where Ethereum needs “good social philosophy” the most.

The app layer is where developers build decentralized applications on top of Ethereum’s base infrastructure and where they make decisions about how these programs operate. 

In an April 12 post on the social media platform Warpcast, Buterin responded to a user’s argument that Ethereum needs a new generation of developers rooted in Ethereum’s core values to renew itself. He argued that it’s the app layer that needs this more.

“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,” Buterin said. 

In comparison, Buterin says a programming language like C++ may not be as influenced by the creator’s ideology, as it is a general-purpose tool that doesn’t have much surface to be made worse or improved by social philosophy. 

“Imagine that C++ had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not,” he said.

Ethereum’s layer 1 is similar to an extent, argued Buterin, though it is more exposed to philosophical influence, citing its move to proof-of-stake (PoS) and supporting light clients as examples.  

“Someone who doesn’t believe in decentralization would not add light clients, or good forms of account abstraction,” he said. 

“Someone who doesn’t mind energy waste would not spend half a decade moving to PoS, but the Ethereum Virtual Machine opcodes might have been roughly the same either way. So Ethereum is perhaps 50% general-purpose,” Buterin added. 

Apps with good social philosophy vs bad  

In a follow-up post, Buterin told a user that in his opinion, crypto privacy protocol Railgun, Web3 social protocol Farcaster, decentralized prediction market Polymarket and messenger app Signal are examples of apps with a good social philosophy. 

“You build apps that do the right thing behind the scenes by default. Signal is a reasonably good example of this, though it has significant flaws of its own. Farcaster is also a good example of this,” Buterin said.

Related: Vitalik Buterin criticizes crypto’s moral shift toward gambling

On the other hand, Buterin said the memecoin platform Pump.fun, the collapsed crypto ecosystem Terra, its native token Terra (LUNA), and the collapsed crypto exchange FTX are examples of bad social philosophy.

“The differences in what the app does stem from differences in beliefs in developers’ heads about what they are here to accomplish,” he said. 

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