we have the ability to create technologies that are decentralized,

removing middlemen

and allowing users to interact with each other directly through a global network.

Decentralized applications have been becoming more and more important in the past 10 years

and have the benefits of massively reducing costs and barriers to entry,

removing single points of failure,

preventing censorship,

and ensuring transparency and trust between all the parties involved in an interaction.

BitTorrent, a file sharing network developed in the early 2000s,

is arguably the first decentralized application to have been created.

BitTorrent allows anyone to share any kind of file with anyone else in the world,

allowing people to distribute the content quickly and easily

even if they do not have the resources to pay for their own website or server.

Five years later, Satoshi Nakamoto came up with the idea of a blockchain,

a sort of distributed database,

and used it to build Bitcoin,

the world's first decentralized currency.

Decentralized currencies like Bitcoin

allow people to send money instantly anywhere around the world

with no regard for national borders

with negligible fees.

Bitcoin is increasingly being used there for international remittances,

micropayments,

and commerce online.

Decentralized applications for finance,

cloud computing,

messaging,

and distributed governance are soon to come.

Ethereum is a platform that is specifically designed

for people to build these kinds of decentralized applications

or "dapps" for short.

The Ethereum client, which we are calling the Etherbrowser,

will include the ability

in peer-to-peer network for sending messages

and a generalized blockchain with a built-in programming language,

allowing people to use the blockchain

for any kind of decentralized application that they want to create.

Ethereum can be used to build financial applications

that are fully trustworthy and transparent

because they run on the blockchain.

Online cryptographically secure system is for managing property and contracts,

social networking and messaging systems

that allow users to maintain control of their own data,

systems for trading underutilized computational resources

like CPU time and hard drive space,

and eventually tools for online voting and distributed governance.

And the most exciting applications of Ethereum

are probably the ones that we have not even thought of.

As with all new platforms for innovation

like the protocols that underlie the internet itself,

it is not always easy to predict

what they're going to be used for.

Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the modern internet as a whole

are all a result of early developments in the world wide web

and Javascript, the programming language of the World Wide Web from the 1990s.

Similarly by providing a universal programmable blockchain

and packaging it up into a client that anyone can use,

the Ethereum project hopes to do the same for finance,

peer-to-peer commerce,

distributed governance, and human collaboration as a whole.

Now the question is:

what will you build on top of the Ethereum?