@VitalikButerin· Feb 16You do not have to agree with me on which applications are and are not corposlop to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with me on what trust assumptions are acceptable in which situations to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with me on political topics to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my views on defi, decentralized social or privacy-preserving payments to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my views on AI to use Ethereum.
You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum.
And you do not have to agree with me on any one of those above things to agree with me on any other.
I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of "permissionlessness" and "censorship resistance" is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks.
But on the flipside, if I say that your application is corposlop, I am not "censoring" you. This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me.
In fact, it is *necessary* that we do this. The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions. Neutrality is for protocols (like HTTP, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum), and neutrality within some scope is for some institutions. The modern world calls out for the courage to clearly state one's principles - including stating principles by pointing to negative examples, that is by criticizing the things in the world that are incompatible with one's principles - and work with those with aligned goals to build the metaverse within which those principles are taken as a baseline.
Such things inherently cannot be constrained to just the layer of the protocol: any principle you have will naturally lead to conclusions, not just about how the protocol should be built, but also what should be built upon it. Furthermore, any such principle will have consequences that go beyond technology, and reach into specific questions within the larger social world. This should not be avoided. Valuing something like "freedom", and then acting as though it has consequences on technology choices, but is completely separate from everything else about our lives, is not pragmatic - it is hollow.
The inevitable converse of this is that (i) a decentralized protocol must not be viewed as belonging to only one metaverse, and (ii) the borders of a metaverse are fuzzy: it is possible, and indeed it is the normal case, to align with any one on some axes and not on other axes.
Linux is a technology of user empowerment and freedom, Linux is also the base layer of a lot of the world's corposlop. It's almost certainly the base layer of many things that I think are good, and you think are bad, and vice versa. Hence, if you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values, and explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar.
Milady.
