We've all heard about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but I am not sure we all know why these cryptocurrency were born and when those got conceptually formed and if they were as a reaction to a real economic problem. So, through some simple words I just want to emphasize the inception phases for each of one and the purpose behind them
First of all we need to remember about the financial crysis that exploded in 2008 from which many of us are still recovering. This is the moment when people started formulating and thought of measures to prevent the world downfall to go through same experiences as in that year. No more than next year - January 2009 - marked the born of Bitcoin as a recul of the global financial crisis.
On of the motivation was to reduce the 3rd party fees and materialize a system that is able to transfer value worldwide, over the internet, without the need of any intermediare which would increase the costs of tranzactions each time. The rezolution was to solve the 'double spend' in any two-parties transactions which evolved as habbit at that time with the effect of a time bomb in the end. So, the first signifiance of the Bitcoin which still holds today is that of programmable money. Even if not limited to this, still it remains the main charachteristic of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
But...as we've started with the decentralization and eliberating from third party feeds...of course this was not enough. Thus, the next step was the inception of Ethereum which would come with other world solving capabilities. The missing piece that Bitcoin was having over the technology that brought to light - blockchain and ability to transfer monetary value between partners and parties - was that it offered limited programming language capabilities over the tranzactions themselves.
Ethereum brought to the table a solution to this and offers an evolving set of programming tools and languages to enable many types of applications and programs built over the blockchain and tranzactions within. The invention behind this was the Ethereum Virtual Machine which rus over the Ethereum network and enables a turing-complete software (meaning that it enables you to write applications (contracts) that can in big lines solve any reasonable computational problem).
Vitalik Buterin is the man behind this technology and which wrote the white paper for Ethereum. The main key features enounced were to ensure the immutability of data, thus restraining unauthorized users from making changes to that data. The Ethereum development platform provided the environment to concept corruption and tamper proof applications, be decentralized and secured with cryptography, protected against hacking attacks and fraudulent attempts and above all with zero downtime. This was possible as the applications on the Ethereum blockchain network are decentralized on multiple many machines which have other machines as failsafe in case some of them go down. We can think of it a super computer spread all over the world which enables the Ethereum network to maintain a stable state at any point in time.
What will be the next step or what technology will surpass Ethereum will need to wait and see, but for sure the ones that will mature first and solve ongoing issues raised by new concepts will thrieve in the end.