When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.

The technical side of Ethereum's efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise.

The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, 'Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?' And if they can come up with a good answer, that's when you know you've got something really interesting.

The Ethereum client is literally a fork of Chromium's webkit backend. The idea is that users can build their own interfaces with HTML/JavaScript just like websites, and they will be viewable with the browser much like websites are viewable with the web browser.

Although the Ethereum blockchain is a public blockchain, it is great to see private and consortium blockchains using the Ethereum code base actively under development.