Decentralized validation and block production are the most valuable and hardest-to-replicate aspects of ETH—it requires a massive number of independent validators and the social consensus and Lindy effect that grow around it. From this, three other attributes naturally follow—permissionless, trustless, and censorship-resistant. These three are 'hard to earn, hard to copy' attributes, and they represent a category-level difference between ETH and traditional finance. Of course, besides ETH, BTC also has this. But compared to BTC, ETH adds programmability and composability on top of this foundation.