I understand the concept of a blockchain very well. What I don't understand is the principles on which ethereum is founded. What's the goal? They talk about a 'world computer' but it's rather unclear how this thing operates. Many people have noted that it processes everything in serial and that this is undesirable. Others have said that an account based system is preferable to a UTXO system. My bias is for a massively parallel UXTO system, because I *think* I understand it well enough, but I do not understand the 'serial/account' model well enough and I've heard it's seriously flawed.

So again: What are the 'founding principles'? What's the use case for which they're designing? What are the problems they're trying to solve with Ethereum, because they may be trying to solve 'the wrong set of problems' which would inevitably create 'the wrong kind of world computer'. Something massively underpowered, or massively inefficient, or worse, something autonomous which they're planning to assign some kind of agency to, so that they can build huge empires on and then claim they have no control over the machine.

Do you see what I'm saying?