I like to think of Ethereum as a giant virtual machine that shares it's CPU (contracts are the instructions) and Storage (the ethereum blockchain) across all no

I like to think of Ethereum as a giant virtual machine that shares it's CPU (contracts are the instructions) and Storage (the ethereum blockchain) across all nodes that participate. Every node re-runs everything locally to validate and move the state of the machine forward. And of course you get paid to do that through mining. When you view it like that it's obviously very costly to execute code & store outputs, so alternative solutions are needed for lower value code. Breakthroughs in these areas could make Ethereum a viable platform for computing, and it honestly feels like we could be entering a new computing paradigm with it.