The block-paradigm in combination with cryptographically protected transactions showed its applicability and utility in a variety of projects, not only in Bitcoin. Each such project can be considered as a simple application that operates on a decentralized but single-element computing resource
We can call this paradigm a single-element transactional machine with a shared state. Ethereum realizes this paradigm in a generalized form.
Moreover, it provides many such resources, each of which has a separate state and operational code, but is able to interact with other resources through the messaging environment.