Yeah just found out about that... Rochard's been making the rounds on podcasts and conferences, which has made me look up all of this stuff again.

As is I think the case with a lot of revolutionary new technologies, astute people tend to be able to project forward lots of major societal implications long before those things become reality. I think of the period in bitcoin's history say ~2012-2015 in a similar light....

Bitcoin had just emerged "from the hacker dungeons" as something that could actually be used by reasonably tech-savvy people without a Linux command line, so people with backgrounds more focused in economics or political theory could start to think about the implications of this thing.

In contrast, once you got to ~2015-2016 that was the first big wave of more Ethereum-focused "corporate" applications, "crypto not bitcoin" startups, etc.