# Mastering Ethereum note 1

By [666cheeseburger.eth](https://paragraph.com/@666cheeseburger) · 2021-11-14

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1.  What is Ethereum?
    
    From a computer science perspective, Ethereum is a deterministic but practically unbounded state machine, consisting of a globally accessible singleton state and a virtual machine that applies changes to that state.
    
    From a more practical perspective, **Ethereum is an open source, globally decentralized computing infrastructure that executes programs called smart contracts. It uses a block chain to synchronize and store the systems’s state changes, along with a cryptocurrency called ether to meter and constrain execution resource costs.**
    
2.  Compared to Bitcoin
    
    purpose : ether is intended as a utility currency to pay for use of the Ethereum platforms as the world computer.
    
    Ethereum is designed to be a general purpose programmable blockchain that runs a virtual machine capable of executing code of arbitrary and unbounded complexity.
    
    Where Bitcoin’s Script language is, intentionally, constrained to simple true/false evaluation of spending conditions, Ethereum’s language is Turing complete, meaning that Ethereum can straightforwardly function as a general-purpose computer.
    
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*Originally published on [666cheeseburger.eth](https://paragraph.com/@666cheeseburger/mastering-ethereum-note-1)*