He's saying Ethereum does similar things to Bitcoin, but the techniques to do them w/ Bitcoin were not understood from the get-go.
For example, today I participated in a demonstration of trustlessly, privately, and securely selling information (a 16x16 sudoku solution) via Bitcoin:
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...
(But you probably won't read about it on HN; no profit in promoting it. </cynic>)