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.

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.

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.