What is the purpose of Ethereum?

What makes Ethereum better or worse than Bitcoin? Is Ethereum meant to be used as a currency or for some magical computer mumbo jumbo?

To divide the Bitcoin community in half then render the entire community useless.

Success.

Ethereum is the mumbo jumbo computer fuel.

Ether is the name of the currency.

Slight technicality.

Divide & conquer the crypto market.

Jewish intelligentsia have the capability to control the market when it's fragmented. If a crypto currency becomes too powerful and overcomes fiat currency - then it's a problem for them.

When I first invested in ETH sub $15, it was my understanding that ETH was distinguished from other cryptocurrencies through its inclusion of Point of Stake and smart contracts, to name just a couple features.

However, now it seems there are going to be other currencies utilizing these features (I even heard BTC will get a smart contracts feature). If this is the case, what will separate Ethereum from the crowd? Turing complete? I'm just not seeing it as clearly as I did about a month ago.

smart contracts, if someone asked just say smart contracts, having the word smart before a common thing makes it seem like a wise investment

why do we need blockchain for a contract?

>gets it

Its a virtual machine on a blockchain.
Imagine you want to gamble, in the simplest example. You go to your fav gambling website, cucks.com, and deposit some money/btc. Then you play a few games and incredibly you come out on top. You want to cash out. You put your request to cash out into the system. And then... nothing. You just got swindled.

With ethereum a gambling program has an open contract anyone can verify. A contract can specify a withdrawal operation that is completely automatic of any human input (meaning the owner of the gambling contract cannot block your withdrawal). For the owner the contract can specify that once the bank reaches a certain amount of ether, some percentage should be sent to owners address. Autonomous program living on the blockchain.

Translation = cryptocurrency is shit and if you want to distract yourself from real life and become an addict to nonsense then this is for you

>>/mlpol

that's a good example thank you, but this still leaves the question to me, why is the actual currency Ether necessary for the smart contracts of Ethereum to exist?

Companies that make the dapps or smart contracts need ethereum to power their shit

Ethereum is not a currency, think of it like crude oil fueling industries

Nope

and it's needed because eth is basically compute power in form of a token

you need compute power to run dapps, contracts n other shit

Think of it this way - to run say your standard program (think higher language -> assembly code), your CPU needs to perform certain operations. For example, iterate over every command, depending on the command - load arguments into registers, use accumulator to add them/substract them/shift/etc... perform jump operations, conditionals etc.

All of the lower level components (registers, accumulators/etc...) are powered by electricity.

For ethereum virtual machine, what could power the applications on the blockchain? If you made the operations "free", then why would the miners (stakers in the future) host the nodes? Instead write operations/mutators for ethereum contracts cost ether/gas, read operations are free. This is a very very simplified view because I gotta run, if you got time, google "Gavin Wood Ethereum Whitepaper", its a 30p technical doc which will set you straight.

So Ethereum is the network, and Ether is basically a reward for the people who run the network? Does Ether get spent, as if it were like gas in an engine and turned into nothing? Is the purpose of Ether not to buy groceries but to eventually get put into the hands of the people who need these applications? In other words is Ether not actually intended to be a currency used in every day life?

But how many are actually using it? to me it just seems like it just speculation and hording to profit and nothing about what it can do or be used for. Another question why hasn't anyone tried to shill(encourage) some poor African & Latin counties or just poor countries in general to buy into any crypto-currencies or the infrastructure . And do you actually believe Bitcoin,ETH,XMR will be used during our lifetime as the basic form of currency for the exchange goods or will they be using a less stricter version of something like appleplay?

>to me it just seems like it just speculation and hording to profit and nothing about what it can do or be used for
You just described all of crypto

That should tell you something

ether is not like bitcoin, it is not a currency

it is basically fuel to power dapps and contract on that ethereum network

but this is also why it has so much potential, the internet can rebuilt on this new platform, the blockchain

The long term goal is to replace the web.
Imagine the tor network, only fast. Or OpenBazaar only.. errmmm working. Or Veeky Forums without the server bill.

Until the wealthy casino owner gets mad at all the money you made and forks to protect their profits.

*cough DAO*

eth stole every idea from potcoin

it's all a matter of who executes it well. Other coins are arriving "late to the game" in this case.

nice try.
/killyourself

Like anything it's a gamble, but speculation on how it could be implemented on a larger scale is the reason I believe it's smart path to invest in.
For all we know this could be a placeholder for the real innovation that has yet to surface. BTC could be perceived as a placeholder for something like ETH to have come about OR BTC and ETC could have different applications and work in unison. It's too early to tell. This is a NEW environment and anyone who says otherwise has their head up their ass.

What if there was a monero ether hybrid with via updated core block chain technology and modernized coding?

I'd say you are a cuck for not buying. Keep your eyes peeled it's happening

Bitcoin got there first. It's so far ahead it will never be caught. So it doesn't really matter which is "better". Bitcoin will always be the big dick!

Ethereum is basically a giant global supercomputer, like AWS everywhere