At CES this past January, IBM researcher Veena Pureswaran described the company’s joint plan with Samsung to get home appliances to exchange cryptocurrency with one another. The currency, called Ether, is similar to Bitcoin, except that the traded commodity isn’t directly related to a financial value. Instead, Ether’s value is computing power.

What distinguishes the Ether and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies from traditional money is the online system that records their every trade. Networks of people called miners use the software to collectively verify and record these cryptocurrencies’ every trade. Like ever-growing strands of DNA, the currencies’ digital addresses, called blockchains, store the details of each trade. Bitcoin and Ether run on their own software platforms, but in both cases, a blockchain makes the whole idea possible. Read more