Just when you were (maybe) beginning to get a basic understanding of the digital currency bitcoin, a second-place digital currency is gaining steam and growing in value. It’s called ether, it runs on a network called Ethereum, and less than one year after launching, its market cap now exceeds $1 billion.
On Thursday, Ethereum hit another business milestone when Coinbase, the leading mainstream platform for buying and trading of bitcoin, added support for ether. Coinbase customers—there are $4 million of them in 32 countries—can now easily buy and trade ether using the Coinbase web site or mobile app.
But would they want to? First they’d have to understand it.
If bitcoin, which runs on a decentralized, permission-less, peer-to-peer blockchain, is still in its infancy—a point bitcoin believers love to make—then Ethereum is barely out of the womb. As the New York Times wrote in March, the network “is complicated enough that even people who know it well have trouble describing it in plain English.” Ethereum’s creator is Vitalik Buterin, a 22-year-old Russian tech-wunderkind who began working on the concept at age 19
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/coinbase-adds-ethereum-ether-bitcoin-000000379.html