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Introduction
Ethereum builds on blockchain and cryptocurrency concepts, so if you are not familiar with these, it’s worth reading a gentle introduction to bitcoin and a gentle introduction to blockchain technology first. This article assumes the reader has a basic familiarity with how Bitcoin works.


What is Ethereum?
Ethereum is software running on a network of computers that ensures that data and small computer programs called smart contracts are replicated and processed on all the computers on the network, without a central coordinator. The vision is to create an unstoppable censorship-resistant self-sustaining decentralised world computer. The official website is https://www.ethereum.org

It extends the blockchain concepts from Bitcoin which validates, stores, and replicates transaction data on many computers around the world (hence the term ‘distributed ledger’). Ethereum takes this one step further, and also runs computer code equivalently on many computers around the world.

What Bitcoin does for distributed data storage, Ethereum does for distributed data storage plus computations. The small computer programs being run are called smart contracts, and the contracts are run by participants on their machines using a sort of operating system called a “Ethereum Virtual Machine”.

How do you run Ethereum?
You can download (or write yourself if you have the patience) some software called an Ethereum client. Just like BitTorrent or Bitcoin, the Ethereum client will connect over the internet to other people’s computers running similar client software and start downloading the Ethereum blockchain from them to catch up. It will also independently validate that each block conforms to the Ethereum rules.

What does the Ethereum client software do? You can use it to:

Connect to the Ethereum network
Explore Ethereum’s blockchain
Create new transactions and smart contracts
Run smart contracts
Mine for new blocks
Your computer becomes a ‘node’ on the network, running an Ethereum Virtual Machine, and behaves equivalently to all the other nodes. Remember in a peer-to-peer network there is no ‘master’ server and any computer has equivalent powers or status to any other.