CODE YOUR OWN UTOPIA: MEET ETHEREUM, BITCOIN'S MOST AMBITIOUS SUCCESSOR
What Bitcoin is for money, Ethereum is for contracts, and contracts are part of what undergirds any relationship or organization or political order
The world’s next social contracts, the successors to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the U.S. Constitution, could be written in Ethereum’s programming language
https://www.ethereum.org/
Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.
Ether, Etherum's internal currency, powers its applications and acts as a 'token of exchange' on the decentralized network.
Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of most kind, intellectual property, and even smart property thanks to hardware integration.
Ethereum borrows the concept of decentralized consensus that makes bitcoin so resilient, yet makes it trivial to build on its foundation. To find out more about how Ethereum works, consult the whitepaper.