The first sentence about why, not how

Until now every document in the corpus has been about mechanism. How the chain holds, how the incentive works, how the network agrees. Then the thread turns, and someone puts a different kind of objection: cryptography cannot solve political problems. The author concedes the point. And then he adds a sentence that does not belong to any of the previous registers — a claim about what is worth doing anyway.

This is the moment the corpus changes shape. Everything before it could have been written by someone solving an interesting problem. This passage could not. It states a purpose, and the vocabulary it reaches for — freedom, arms race, territory — belongs to a specific tradition that had been arguing about cryptography and civil liberty since the 1990s. We record the vocabulary. We do not conclude membership. Reading a tradition, arguing with it, and belonging to it produce similar sentences, and this is one sentence. One more thing happens in the same week. Among the sceptics, a single clearly favourable voice appears — a cryptographer who says the idea looks promising. The name will return, and when it does we will have a question to ask about it.

Block sources (originals): metzdowd thread, Nov 2008