So, here is the thing, let's not consider the question of whether Ethereum will or won't be successful. I don't have the faintest clue whether it will be or not

So, here is the thing, let's not consider the question of whether Ethereum will or won't be successful. I don't have the faintest clue whether it will be or not. But, let's for a moment assume it is successful, wildly so. Would it be a big deal? Yes, it likely would be. If Ethereum is as successful as some of people working on it hope it will be, it could be as important as HTTP. Yeah, HTTP is one protocol... on the internet, most people have little idea about how it works or what it's about, yet it does affect billions of people and is an important part (at the infrastructure level) of one of the defining phenomenons of our era: the Internet. Some people hope that cryptocurrencies are going to be next decade's Internet and Ethereum is going to be its HTTP. The main break from the standard internet given by Ethereum is the following: fully distributed apps that exist not in any server, but as a public contract between their users. If you want eBay on the internet, you build a program on a server you own and tell it how to mediate transactions between buyers and sellers. If you want eBay on Ethereum, you publish a contract about how buyers and sellers should behave, and include in that contract some provisions that enforce themselves, no middleman required. Will this be practical? Who knows. Would it be useful if it works? I believe it would be. Would it be industry changing? Perhaps. Would it be world changing? Well... let's say it at least has a chance. Now, whether Ethereum is another http/www/html or, say, another Project Xanadu, that's a different question. Ethereum is an idea that can only work if many untested pieces turn out to work together as desired and the main benefits from those technologies are sufficient for people to buy into what would be a clean departure from the existing web. Experience shows that such departures are seldom successful (remember when every website was going to be a Java Applet? That was still way less of a moonshot than Dapps). But the thing is, regardless of whether Ethereum succeeds or not, its development is likely to produce useful ideas, and it is a project that, at least in principle, should it succeed, really can change our infrastructure. It is worth keeping in mind, that, in some cases, changing infrastructure has changed the world quite significantly (e.g. trains, telegraph, Internet, and even WWW vs the telnet/email era of the Internet).