Maybe I'm just being cynical (or jealous!), but when I read "Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum", I think it's worth asking what qualifies as successful, because to me, the inflated market cap of a speculative asset isn't an objective measure.
I think that Ethereum's market cap has perhaps created an unearned reputation for solving an essential problem (running any verified, distributed computation) and being the best solution to large-scale verifiable computation, when I would argue that verifying a computation in a distributed system by having each node (or some large subset of nodes, if sharded) perform every step of every computation is not an optimal solution.
I think that Ethereum's market cap has perhaps created an unearned reputation for solving an essential problem (running any verified, distributed computation) and being the best solution to large-scale verifiable computation, when I would argue that verifying a computation in a distributed system by having each node (or some large subset of nodes, if sharded) perform every step of every computation is not an optimal solution.