He's saying Ethereum does similar things to Bitcoin, but the techniques to do them w/ Bitcoin were not understood from the get-go.
They've even been understood for years too...
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>)
Or maybe you are trying to say that this could have been done on Bitcoin? Maybe, but whatever you try to shoehorn into Bitcoin's crippled contract pseudolang is going to be an order of magnitude simpler in a language that is Turing complete.