what is ethereum?
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. Ethereum is used to build decentralized applications (dApps) on its platform. It was created in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, and the Ethereum blockchain is sometimes referred to as "Ethereum" or "ETH."
Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that it was designed to be more flexible and to support more complex applications. While Bitcoin is primarily a digital currency that allows for peer-to-peer transactions, Ethereum is a platform that allows developers to build and run decentralized applications, or dApps, using smart contracts. These smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum has its own programming language called Solidity, which developers use to write smart contracts and dApps. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a runtime environment that executes the smart contracts and dApps on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.
The project was bootstrapped via an ether presale in August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, with contributions from great minds across the globe.