The way i think about Ethereum is that it&#x27;s a cloud computing platform upon which the whole world can see which program the server is running. The usefulness of this is that if you want to run a computing service that administers something of great value to others (such as a vote-counting service or a property registry), other people might be suspicious that you will use your administrative access to the server to corrupt the system. With Ethereum, the service provider doesn&#x27;t have any admin access (and neither do the people upon whose hardware the program is ultimately running on); the cloud computer just runs the program you upload, and everyone can see what program that is.<p>In addition, it runs your service robustly, and preserves the entire history of the computation forever. The downside is that these transparency and robustness features make the service a lot more expensive than ordinary cloud computing, as well as more difficult to program on.<p>It doesn&#x27;t really have much to do with Bitcoin or currency (except that (a) like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses blockchain technology to achieve these things; but that&#x27;s an implementation detail (b) a Bitcoin clone is one of the many things you could build as an Ethereum application (c) for technical reasons you buy Ethereum server time via purchasing server-time-credits called &quot;Ether&quot;).<p>As a project, Ethereum is very technically ambitious (they are not just working on a cloud computing platform, but also trying to advance blockchain technology in general, eg developing a new proof-of-stake algorithm, and eg developing a way to not have to replicate computations on every node on the network). They are trying to do a lot of new things at once, which is risky (but awesome).