[wonkaWonka]

  Which community would that be?

Being an insightful guy and a good public speaker has value. Especially in a technical field. Your talks on things like elliptic curve cryptography are solid talks. Like it or not, you could probably trade on giving those kinds of talks alone, and never have gotten your hands dirty doing the work, to prove the theory correct in your own mind.

It's not hand-wavey to be able to give a voice to ideas, provide insight through speaking and interacting with a crowd, and people make careers off of this sort of activity in many fields, and not just technology. It's the same sort of dichotomy you'll see in other hard sciences, where there are experimentalists and theorists.

So he's not shocking audiences by injecting malicious payloads and keylogging the shit out of people, or deploying wi-fi pineapples or pen testing corporate clients. There are other vectors into the field, and sometimes skill sets are multi-disciplinary Venn diagrams.

You'd suggest that he's a Paris Hilton, but there's more to it than that.

[tptacek]

My talks on ECC are an interesting example, as they're talks on research that I didn't myself do (Sean Devlin wrote the challenges for them, and we got the ideas for those challenges from lots of other people).