Vitalik Buterin Calls for Ethereum Community to Reconnect with Core Values

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has urged the Ethereum community not to forget its core values such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and openness to all users.

In a recent blog post on December 29, Vitalik Buterin revisited the fundamental principles of cryptocurrency (often referred to as cypherpunk) – including decentralization, censorship resistance, permissionlessness, and open-source – and called on the community to remember that they are contributing to a technological revolution.

Buterin began by sharing personal experiences of interacting with cryptocurrency in everyday life, such as using Bitcoin for payments. These examples were used by the co-founder to highlight that crypto is not just about developing independent tools and models, but about building a foundation for a freer world that blends technology, society, and economics.

Vitalik Buterin also referenced the concept of Web3, originally conceived by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, which aims to unite various technology protocols to create an entirely new layer of the internet, open-source and independent from centralized infrastructure providers.

However, Buterin noted that since 2017, the initial developmental directions of crypto have gradually been overshadowed, replaced by applications focused solely on finance and investment. Moreover, many developers not using blockchain increasingly view the crypto industry as a distraction from its goal of decentralizing technology.

Only one product, the ENS domain, has gained widespread acceptance. In countries facing inflation, cryptocurrencies have indeed been used for payments, but often through centralized intermediaries like CEX exchanges or TRON's USDT.

The prominent reason for crypto's failure to achieve widespread acceptance and instead becoming an investment channel, as highlighted by Vitalik Buterin, is still high transaction fees. Consequently, those willing to use blockchain are mostly speculators in the market, as they become richer.

By the current year of 2023, Ethereum has developed several solutions to reduce transaction fees, including:

• Layer-2 solutions like rollups and zero-knowledge proofs as supplements;
• Privacy-enhancing solutions in transactions like Railway and Nocturne;
• Account Abstraction to simplify cryptocurrency usage;
• Light clients to reduce the burden of running nodes and being validators.

Therefore, Vitalik Buterin calls for the community to return to the core values of crypto, making Ethereum truly decentralized, barrier-free, censorship-resistant, and open-source.

Additionally, the Ethereum co-founder believes that the Ethereum network has already created effective solutions to address emerging challenges during its formation and development, such as DEX platforms replacing CEX, smart contracts to reduce the risk of losing private keys, alert features to prevent users from interacting with fraudulent contracts, and MEV solutions to prevent front-running.

In a broader perspective, Ethereum now offers a complete suite of products to replace the basic functions of traditional Web2, from asset custody, enterprise models, internet domains, messaging apps, social networks, to methods of countering malicious actors using zero-knowledge proofs.

However, a prominent issue that needs addressing is the need to change community perceptions and steer them back toward Ethereum's core values. Vitalik Buterin emphasizes that while financial incentives are necessary motivators, their misuse can lead to adverse effects. Therefore, balancing these aspects is crucial to achieve the best outcomes for both the community and projects building within the ecosystem.