Vitalik Buterin stated that the one sentence explanation of Ethereum as being that: It is a general purpose blockchain. He states that this statement will make a lot of sense to someone who already knows blockchain. He states that it is a decentralized network of many different computers that are together maintaining this ecology of database together.
There are particular ways of plugging in to the database and to send transactions related to particular things, but no one can tamper with the system that is outside of the rules.
Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that instead of having the rules built around sustaining one application, it is more general purpose where people can built their own applications and the rules for whatever applications that they build. And, these rules are executed and implemented on the Ethereum platform.
He pointed to how one person gave an explanation where Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet where everyone controls their own 5 squares of the spreadsheet, but Ethereum is a spreadsheet with a network. So, everyone kind of controls their own accounts, which is their own little piece of this universe. However, these pieces of universe can have pieces of code and they can interact with each other according to pre-programmed rules and you can build a lot of things on top of that like Bitcoin built a monetary system on top of the network, Ethereum can build decentralized domain name systems for various decentralized financial contracts, projection markets, non-fungible tokens and all sorts of different schemes that people have been coming up with.
So, what is built is that which people build with their own creativity. However, the core difference between building an application on Ethereum versus building it on some traditional centralized platform is this core idea that once you have built in an application on Ethereum the application does not need anyone for its continued existence. And, the application is guaranteed to continue running according to the rules that was specified and no one has the ability to irregularly tamper with it.
Ethereum according to Tim Ferris has evolved and grown bigger than what Vitalik would have probably imagined or anticipated. He stated that in some sense we are now discovering Ethereum and no longer building it. He stated that he also would like to think of it as an unstoppable application platform for building unstoppable applications kind of like a world computer. He says it is a great place to run very, very important computer programs where we do not trust the computer itself or trust the other people to execute code on our behalf, then we can check the code on the machines of the people from across the world.
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