3The Evolution of Ethereum into Web3
Ethereum changes everything in a way that flying cars would not, though I'm still disappointed that the most important technological progress in my lifetime—Elon Musk ventures aside—seems to be in the world of bits and not atoms. I'm less excited today by flying cars, spaceships, and even advances in genomic medicine than by the possibilities Ethereum unlocks, because the former are fundamentally products or commodities. These can be novel and important, but as individual products being exchanged, they exist at the surface layer of the deeper economic system. Ethereum offers a new and different underlying foundation for building an alternative economic system with all the benefits of the traditional one, in addition to new benefits conferred by decentralization and the ability to build any economically and socially important application on top of the blockchain.
Bitcoin is fundamentally a system for moving bitcoins securely between wallets. Ethereum similarly allows users to move ether tokens between wallets. The difference is that this capability to act as a money system only scratches the surface of Ethereum's functionality. What is important to understand about Ethereum is that it's not a closed set of predetermined features; it is rather a substrate, or a moldable clay, for building anything that involves value in a digital context.
Since the Ethereum network launched in 2015, computer scientists, developers, governments, enterprises, ...
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