Cryptocurrency Should Focus on Liberating Humanity Rather Than Just Developing Technology — Vitalik Buterin

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize humanity over technology: Vitalik Buterin calls on blockchain developers to focus on liberating humanity rather than just building complex technology.
• Lessons from Web2: The free Internet of the early era became “walled gardens” in the Web2 era, and Web3 needs to avoid repeating this mistake.
• Ethical responsibility: Developers need to think about the social and ethical meaning of what they build, asking whether their products bring freedom to users.
• Values struggle: The cryptocurrency community is divided between those pursuing profits (“suitcoiners”) and those maintaining the original cypherpunk spirit of freedom and privacy.

In a significant speech at the EthCC conference, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin issued a strong call to the blockchain development community, emphasizing that the cryptocurrency industry needs to return to its original mission: liberating humanity rather than just focusing on building complex technical tools.

Lessons from the Decline of Free Internet

Buterin drew a profound comparison between the free spirit of the early 1990s Internet and today’s blockchain landscape. Specifically, he noted that the open Internet championed by pioneers like John Perry Barlow has gradually disappeared in the Web2 era, where “98% of major platforms enforce content censorship” (Electric Capital 2024).

He further described Web2 as a collection of “walled gardens,” warning that many Web2 founders – later known for strict censorship – initially considered themselves freedom advocates.

Warning for the Web3 Generation

Building on this historical parallel, Buterin issued a serious warning to Web3 founders:

“People working in cryptography really need to think more actively about cryptography as something that has social and ethical meaning. You really have to think actively about the social and ethical meaning of what you’re building.”

He continued to emphasize: “If you’re building something, the first question to ask is: Are you making your users more free?”

The Struggle Between Cypherpunk Spirit and “Suitcoiners”

The cypherpunk movement has prioritized privacy and freedom through end-to-end encryption since the 1980s. Historically, early cypherpunks popularized digital encryption when the NSA restricted its use in the 1990s.

From 2009 to around 2021, cypherpunk ideals such as privacy, anti-censorship, building parallel systems, and libertarian political theory were closely associated with the cryptocurrency industry.

However, the rapid development of the cryptocurrency field and the sharp price increases of digital assets attracted attention from corporate and government institutions. These institutional actors, called “suitcoiners” by the community, have created a clear divide within the cryptocurrency community.

The Community Division

Despite these ideals, critical challenges persist: For instance, ZK-proofs require 10,000x efficiency gains for mass adoption, while 55% of Ethereum nodes run on just three cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner)

Buterin’s speech comes at a time when the cryptocurrency industry is in a crucial transformation phase, trying to balance attracting institutional investment while maintaining traditional cypherpunk values.