He observed that Vitalik Buterin does not want Ethereum to win the general performance competition.

He wants it to reject that competition from the start.
In an era where various blockchains compete to attract users with beautiful interfaces and partnerships with giant companies,
Buterin points Ethereum in the opposite direction, towards what he calls reliable technology—tools designed to protect, not to impress.

His stance is not just about aesthetics.
He sees a deeper structural problem.
When technology prioritizes attracting large numbers of users over fundamental principles,
it gradually becomes indistinguishable from the systems it aims to replace.
Buterin believes Ethereum is heading in that direction, and that fixing it requires more than just code updates.

His message to developers is clear:
Don’t try to be Apple or Google by viewing crypto merely as technology to enhance efficiency or beauty.
Chasing organizational growth will lead Ethereum to the same position as the platforms it challenges—convenient for users but controlled by interests outside their hands.

His proposed approach is to build a digital infrastructure where no single player holds dominant power.
Buterin calls this the reduction of all centralization—
a state where governments and corporations cannot fully control individuals’ digital lives.
He links this to the spillover from the old system to the principles of 1990s cyberpunk, which warned about surveillance structures long before anyone talked about surveillance capitalism.

What sets Buterin apart from mere philosophy is that he applies it to personal decision-making.
He shifted from Google Docs to Fileverse, a decentralized encrypted document platform.
He switched from Gmail to Proton Mail, from Telegram to Signal, and started running AI models on his own hardware instead of sending data to cloud servers.

Each change responds to the same logic:
reducing the surface area where outsiders can collect or profit from data.
The spillover from platforms controlled by giant corporations becomes a model of the digital life Buterin wants—where Ethereum’s infrastructure is accessible to everyone.

This is complicated because personal sovereignty on one's own hardware has limitations.
When tasks become too large, private systems can’t handle them.
The open question remains:
Can decentralized computing networks truly solve this problem, or are they just replacing one dependency with another?

But deeper than that, Buterin questions Ethereum’s value—what role it should serve for its users,
and what it should reject to fulfill that debt.
His answer becomes clearer:
Ethereum must provide space where users’ data, transactions, and communications belong to them—
not just as features, but as guarantees embedded into the fundamental protocol.