A wide net, made in Canada, to capture all the fish. The number of hats(competitors?/opportunities?) we now can choose from just exploded ten fold:

"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:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa....

In the second half of the Keiser Report: New Crypto Phenomenon Ethereum (E569) (published Mar 1, 2014), Max interviews Charles Hoskinson, a cryptographer and one of the people behind Ethereum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdAnyC45ZbU&t=724 [video]