Yes, it was a huge shift in a number of ways from writing a scholarly paper. One is that when you write a scholarly paper, the language basically has to be dry, otherwise, the paper is likely to be rejected by peers. A funny story about that. In 1999, I co-authored a paper — actually it was the paper that proposed the term proof-of-work [the consensus mechanism behind Bitcoin]. We cited a popular cookbook, “The Joy of Cooking,” because the title of the paper included the word bread pudding and we wanted a reference to explain what it was. A reviewer wanted to reject the paper because he felt this reference wasn’t appropriately scholarly. That’s the type of milieu in which you operate in academia.
