If you haven’t read the Ethereum whitepaper, I recommend you at least have a glimpse of it.

https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper

I know whitepapers are quite technical and meant for mostly software developers, but you have to admit that Vitalik is a damned genius, and you should look at some key points that I feel are worth understanding.

Already, by reading the preamble, you already see that he wanted to stray away from cryptocurrency only being a currency, and turn it into something way, way more. He felt like creating specialized blockchains for separate use cases was not ideal; Ethereum became an abstraction.

What is more interesting about Ethereum, however, is that the Ethereum protocol moves far beyond just currency. Protocols around decentralized file storage, decentralized computation and decentralized prediction markets, among dozens of other such concepts, have the potential to substantially increase the efficiency of the computational industry, and provide a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer. Finally, there is also a substantial array of applications that have nothing to do with money at all.

He goes on and lists the origins and philosophies of Bitcoin and crypto. Did you know that b-money was the first to propose the proof of work system?

There's just such a massive wealth of information that isn't just for you to understand how Ethereum works, but the history of crypto.

Vitalik and his whitepaper is the reason why we have DeFi, NFTs, and other competing blockchains. He changed crypto completely, and just reading this whitepaper is a piece of history. This here should be glorified as one of the greatest of all time, to the likes of Satoshi's.