The key technology of cryptocurrency is the blockchain, which essentially allows for many sorts of centralized verification to be replaced with math. Most of the application ideas floating around the cryptocurrency world aren't fundamentally new, but are rather taking centralized ideas and doing them in a decentralized way.
So, Bitcoin is just online money transfers, but without banks or credit card companies or Paypal being involved. Ethereum is just the stock market (and lots of other things), but without Wall Street or any of the other centralized authorities.
It's not yet clear what the best use-cases are, or which specific implementations (if any) will survive. But I'm pretty optimistic about someone finding something useful to do with this technology.
So, Bitcoin is just online money transfers, but without banks or credit card companies or Paypal being involved. Ethereum is just the stock market (and lots of other things), but without Wall Street or any of the other centralized authorities.
It's not yet clear what the best use-cases are, or which specific implementations (if any) will survive. But I'm pretty optimistic about someone finding something useful to do with this technology.