Ethereum has gained more popularity in recent months. It was hovering around $10 earlier this year and now Ether has a value of $340 as of today. 
Ethereum is second to Bitcoin in marketcap. It is predicted that Ethereum will be around $700 by end of December 2017 and $2000 by end of December 2018. We all have seen growth of Bitcoin. Ethereum has just started and will price will skyrocket soon.
What is Ethereum?
Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. It provides a decentralized Turing-complete virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes. Ethereum also provides a cryptocurrency token called “ether“, which can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant nodes for computations performed. “Gas”, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.
Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale during July–August 2014. The system went live on 30 July 2015.
Ether is the second most valuable form of digital money after Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, it is a decentralised payment network, with its own cryptograpic currency, that allows anonymous payments to be sent across the internet without the need for a bank or other third party.
Transactions are stored in a decentralised ledger, the blockchain, and are visible for everyone on the network to see.
How Ethereum differs from Bitcoin?
As the second-biggest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, Ethereum has inevitably drawn comparisons to it. Its rapid rise has also led to claims of a bubble. But advocates say ethereum has several advantages over bitcoin that make it more useful.
The first is that ethereum allows for “blocks”, the records of cryptocurrency transactions, that can be created much more quickly than bitcoin. While bitcoin has been more widely adopted by online retailers and even some physical stores, ethereum’s fans believe its efficiency makes it better for transactions, rather than storing value.
But the major advantage of ethereum is that the technology allows for computer applications, not just the currency, to run on the network. Bitcoin’s appeal lies in money that is not controlled by any one party and does not have to run through a central server, but ethereum allows not just money, but all sorts of other things to run on the network. If you store files on a cloud storage service like Dropbox, you are trusting Dropbox to take care of it, but on a decentralised storage network you are putting your faith in others who are using it and have an interest in maintaining it.
A number of apps are being built on Ethereum, and the network is also being used by start-ups to raise money with initial coin offerings, which exchange ether or other currencies for special “tokens” that grant access to a service.
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