In the last few months, there has been a great amount of interest into the area of using
Bitcoin-like blockchains - the mechanism that allows for the entire world to agree on the state of
a public ownership database - for more than just money. Commonly cited applications include using
on-blockchain digital assets to represent custom currencies and financial instruments
("colored coins"), "smart property" devices such as cars which track a colored
coin on a blockchain to determine their present legitimate owner, as well as more advanced
applications such as decentralized exchange, financial derivatives, peer-to-peer gambling and
on-blockchain identity and reputation systems. Perhaps the most ambitious of all cited applications
is the concept of autonomous agents or decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) - autonomous
entities that operate on the blockchain without any central control whatsoever, eschewing all
dependence on legal contracts and organizational bylaws in favor of having resources and funds
autonomously managed by a self-enforcing smart contract on a cryptographic blockchain.
However, most of these applications are difficult to implement today, simply because the scripting systems of
Bitcoin, and even next-generation cryptocurrency protocols such as the Bitcoin-based colored coins protocol
and so-called "metacoins", are far too limited to allow the kind of arbitrarily complex computation
that DAOs require. What this project intends to do is take the innovations that such protocols bring, and
generalize them - create a fully-fledged, Turing-complete (but heavily fee-regulated) cryptographic ledger
that allows participants to encode arbitrarily complex contracts, autonomous agents and relationships that
will be mediated entirely by the blockchain. Rather than being limited to a specific set of transaction
types, users will be able to use Ethereum as a sort of "Lego of crypto-finance" - that is to say,
one will be able to implement any feature that one desires simply by coding it in the protocol's internal
scripting language. Custom currencies, financial derivatives, identity systems and decentralized
organizations will all be easy to do, but more importantly, unlike previous systems, it will also be possible
to construct transaction types that even the Ethereum developers did not imagine. Altogether, we believe that
this design is a solid step toward the realization of "cryptocurrency 2.0"; we hope that Ethereum
will be as significant an addition to the cryptocurrency ecosystem as the advent of Web 2.0 was to the
static-content-only internet of 1999.
...
http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
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