Great points, thanks! Can't believe I completely forgot to mention that the EVM runs on ETH. I added pretty much all of your points to the main text. The only thing I couldn't find a place for is your note that it's buying futures (and that's mostly because I don't know how futures work.) Re: security:Ethereum's security thus comes from a) keeping everyone on the latest block, b) having miners do an arbitrary amount of work, and c) only accepting the result after the majority has validated it. So where normal money (called 'fiat' by people who clearly have never driven a small Italian cars) is secure because it's backed by governments, cryptocurrency is only as secure as its protocols are.
Edits are great. Nice job. I don't know if there's room for this or not, but the natural instinct when you tell someone that the currency is based on unbreakable code is to say "they said the Titanic was unsinkable" and shit like that. My own understanding gets hazy here because cryptography is not my strong point (and is pretty devilish to try and learn, as a layman) but if I understand correctly, you could crack Ethash and it wouldn't matter because you'd still need your version of the blockchain to be accepted by every other node on the network in order for your version of reality to prevail. Maybe that's another discussion - "the security of the blockchain" or something.