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Softwar: A Novel Theory On Power Projection

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Softwar is an academic manuscript written by MIT's U.S. National Defense Fellow , Major Jason Lowery. In this thesis, Lowery argues that Bitcoin is not only digital money , but has ushered in a new era of digital warfare. He presents a novel theory to the U.S. Department of Defense that BItcoin represents a new form of digital-age warfare that will transform national security , cyber security , and possibly even the base-layer architecture of the internet . He also pays special attention to the projection of power and how Proof of Work makes it possible to project physical power in, out of and through cyberspace. Using concepts from different subjects like Biology, computer science, Anthropology, political science, and evolution, Lowery concludes that Bitcoin represents a national strategic imperative that the US should support and adopt as quickly as possible, else it risks losing its lead as a global superpower in the 21st century.

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ABOUT SOFTWAR

The book posits Bitcoin as a potentially transformative tool for national security and power projection within the digital realm.

The thesis stressed the potential of Bitcoin ’s proof-of-work technologies to function as a novel type of electro-cyber power projection tool. 

This groundbreaking idea, which he dubbed “ softwar ,” was considered to hold transformative potential for national strategic security in the 21st century.

BOOK WITHDRAWAL

Jason Lowrey has withdrawn his book from public press, prompting speculation among readers and academics alike.

The work, which was presented as a thesis to the System Design and Management Program at MIT in February 2023, has additionally been removed from the MIT library’s inventory.

The abrupt and unexplained removal of “ Softwar ” from the public sphere has created a cloud of unanswered queries.

At press time , Softwar had been removed from Amazon , Google shopping listings, Thriftbooks, and other major booksellers, as well as from the MIT Press site.

The information contained herein is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. It is not designed to meet your personal financial situation - we are not investment advisors nor do we give personalized investment advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the publisher and are subject to change without notice. It may become outdated an there is no obligation to update any such information.

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Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin

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Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin

Jason paul lowery.

365 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2023

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Description Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin

Pages : pages

Publisher :

ISBN-10 : B0BW358F37

ISBN-13 : 9798371524188

This is a high-definition, color-printed manuscript of an academic thesis written by Major Jason Lowery, an active-duty US Space Force astronautical engineer and US National Defense Fellow at MIT tasked with advising senior US military leaders about the national strategic implications of Bitcoin. In this thesis, Lowery presents a novel theory to the US Department of Defense that

Bitcoin doesn't just represent a peer-to-peer cash system, it also (and more importantly) represents a new form of digital-age warfare that will transform national security, cyber security, and possibly even the base-layer architecture of the internet. Using scientific concepts from biology, evolution, anthropology, political science, and computer theory, Lowery summarizes the dynamics of power projection in human society and provides an argument for why emerging proof-of-work technologies (namely Bitcoin) will have a dramatic impact on how humans organize, cooperate, and compete on a global scale by empowering populations to project physical power in, from, and through cyberspace. Major Lowery concludes that Bitcoin represents a national strategic imperative that the US should support and adopt as quickly as possible, else it risks losing its lead as a global superpower in the 21st century.

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Signal22Noise Updates

Jason Lowery’s Novel Theory of Power Projection in Nature, Society, and Cyberspace: An Initial Reaction

by Richard Martin

I’ve started reading Jason Lowery’s master’s thesis on the national security implications of Bitcoin ( Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin ). I’m a little over halfway through the work, and I find that the insights I’m gaining on almost every page are mind-blowing.

This article in not intended as a full review of Lowery’s book or a critique of his thesis. My purpose is to start reacting in writing to his overall thesis and providing commentary and analysis of the insights I’ve been gaining from it. I’m inspired to do so by the impact his thesis is having on my thinking as well as those “reaction” videos that are so prevalent on YouTube®. I will address these to Jason through Linked In and Twitter, in the hope of starting a fruitful dialogue.

With the publication of Softwar, Lowery presents a novel theory on power projection in nature, human society, and the cybersphere. The latter is where Lowery gets into the national security aspects of Bitcoin. I’ve not yet gotten to that part of his thesis, so I will leave that aside for now.

With that said, there is plenty to digest in the book about power projection in nature and society and its implications for peace, security, and prosperity. In a nutshell, Lowery claims—convincingly—that power projection is fundamental to the genesis, evolution, and survival of life in general and of all organisms.

This may seem self-evident, but his formulation of what he calls “primordial economics” is compelling, as he bases it on physical power. Physical power is measured in watts, the amount of energy transformed or, alternatively, work performed in each second (1 watt equals 1 joule per second; the joule is the unit of work produced by a force of 1 newton to displace a mass by 1 meter; 1 newton is the force required to accelerate a mass of 1 kilogram at a rate of 1 meter per second per second). In other words, physical power is defined as the rate of displacement of mass over distance.

As we can see, basic physical concepts are all based on mass, energy, space, and time. Lowery equates the physical with the real. If there is no displacement of mass, or transformation of energy, then the phenomenon isn’t physical and is within the realm of human imagination and mentation, and therefore abstract. While we could possibly quibble about these conceptions, Lowery’s purpose is to advance the discussion by providing functional definitions of physical power and abstract power, and he succeeds in that respect. I will address abstract power and its relationship with physical power in a future installment of this series, as I’m still digesting it.

To survive and prosper, organisms must project power so they can acquire and consume resources while simultaneously protecting themselves from being attacked and consumed by other organisms. This is summarized in a simple mathematical expression:

BCR A  = B A  / C A , where

BCR A  stands for Benefit-Cost Ratio of Attack. The higher an organism’s BCR A  the greater the likelihood that it will be attacked and consumed by another organism.

B A  stands for Benefit of Attack and represents the resource payoff for an organism of attacking or consuming the prey organism or object of consumption. The higher an organism’s B A  for any given value of C A , the higher the BCR A .

C A  stands for Cost of Attack and represents the “price” the prey organism or object of consumption imposes on attacking or consuming organisms. The higher an organism’s C A  for any given value of B A , the lower the BCR A .

An organism with BCR A  greater than 1 is attractive to a predator, and the higher the ratio, the more attractive it is as prey. Conversely, an organism with a BCR A  between 0 and 1 is unattractive as a potential object of attack and is much less likely to fall prey to a predator trying to consume it for its resources. In simple terms, an organism with a BCR A  below 1 is likely to inflict a high cost and even potential death on the predatory organism. The closer the ratio gets to 0, the higher the probability that the organism will survive attack by another organism. This is the essence of what Lowery calls “primordial economics.”

Now, I’d like to propose that Lowery’s formulation can in fact be construed as a formal statement of what Ludwig von Mises called “praxeology,” the science of human action. Mises theorized that human beings act to relieve felt uneasiness. Resources (food, water, vitamins, etc.) for energy and matter and the imperative to survive and prosper are the driving forces of human action, and life in general.

In this sense, Lowery’s primordial economics can be viewed as a more general statement of Mises’s notion of praxeology (human action), one that applies to the entire living world. Organisms must survive and thrive, and to do so they must feed and breed, and secure their existence against predators and entropy. The basis for this is power projection.

I won’t address the details of his exposition and argument, but it strikes me as a way to reconceptualize the relationship between war/politics and exchange/economics. Austrian economists, especially the more libertarian types, tend to see war/politics and exchange/economics as mutually exclusive categories. However, Mises always saw economics as being the most well-developed part of praxeology.

For Mises, praxeology is the science of human action, and economics is part of praxeology, specifically the tool to analyze market exchange (catallactics), the division of labour, and other categories of human action unhindered by coercion. This approach then undergirds the analysis of the effects of coercion—i.e., politics, violence, and war—on unhindered economic action.

The following diagram summarizes how I see the relationships between each of these concepts. Power projection includes praxeology, which includes economics, which includes catallactics (the study of market exchange).

There are implications of this conceptualization for peace, security, and prosperity. I will address these in another instalment along with other insights and reactions to Lowery’s thesis on power projection.

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ISBN: B0BW358F37

ISBN13: 9798371524188

Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin

This is a high-definition, color-printed manuscript of an academic thesis written by Major Jason Lowery, an active-duty US Space Force astronautical engineer and US National Defense Fellow at MIT tasked with advising senior US military leaders about the national strategic implications of Bitcoin. In this thesis, Lowery presents a novel theory to the US Department of Defense that Bitcoin doesn't just represent a peer-to-peer cash system, it also (and... Read Full Overview

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Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin

• Feb 28, 2023
• #Computersecurity #CryptocurrencySecurity #Bitcoin

This is a high-definition, color-printed manuscript of an academic thesis written by Major Jason Lowery, an active-duty US Space Force astronautical engineer and US National Defense Fellow at MIT tasked with advising senior US military leaders about the national strategic implications of Bitcoin. In this thesis, Lowery presents a novel theory to the US Department of Defense that Bitcoin doesn't just represent a peer-to-peer cash system, it also (and more importantly) represents a new form of digital-age warfare that will transform national security, cyber security, and possibly even the base-layer architecture of the internet. Using scientific concepts from biology, evolution, anthropology, political science, and computer theory, Lowery summarizes the dynamics of power projection in human society and provides an argument for why emerging proof-of-work technologies (namely Bitcoin) will have a dramatic impact on how humans organize, cooperate, and compete on a global scale by empowering populations to project physical power in, from, and through cyberspace. Major Lowery concludes that Bitcoin represents a national strategic imperative that the US should support and adopt as quickly as possible, else it risks losing its lead as a global superpower in the 21st century.

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Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin Paperback – 18 February 2023

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A US defense researcher lays out his controversial thesis on bitcoin playing an essential role in national security — and explains why the advantage of buying bitcoin to maintain superpower status 'cannot be understated'

• As Russia invaded Ukraine, cryptocurrencies have provided a lifeline to the global financial system for Ukrainians.
• On a podcast, a US defense researcher explains how bitcoin can now play a key role in national security.
• He shares why the advantage of buying bitcoin to maintain superpower status "cannot be understated."

An astronautical engineer in the US Space Force and a national defense fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking at bitcoin through a different, and somewhat controversial, lens.

MIT research fellow Jason Lowery spends his time focusing on emerging technologies and how they could impact national security. Right now, his focus is on bitcoin.

On a March 17 episode of "The Pomp Podcast", Lowery breaks down why policymakers need to start taking crypto seriously for national security reasons.

"I'm the first and only one that I know of in any academic institution that is treating bitcoin this way," said Lowery on the podcast. "And I started this well before the national strategic military implications of this technology showed itself on the world stage."

Bitcoin is most often seen in the investment world as "digital gold" or as a "hedge against inflation" due to its scarce nature. 

However when Russia invaded Ukraine, investors quickly flooded into traditional safe-haven assets, like gold, while bitcoin plummeted.

At first glance, it appeared as though the investment case for bitcoin had completely fallen apart. 

But under the surface, bitcoin was excelling in one of its very first envisioned use cases, a hedge against the financial system.

Hedging the financial system

In response to Russia's sudden invasion, the Ukrainian government quickly set up an account for cryptocurrency donations. It's now become vital in the country's fight against Russia.

During Thursday's Senate Banking Committee hearing , titled "understanding the role of digital assets in illicit finance", Michael Chobanian, the founder of Ukrainian cryptocurrency KUNA Exchange and president of Blockchain Association of Ukraine , explained the importance of cryptocurrencies for Ukrainians on the ground.

"Even before the war, Ukraine was the number one country per capita in terms of crypto wallets and usage," said Chobanian at the hearing. "Now it's probably double that. The reason for that is you cannot buy US dollars on the bank account right now, because the national bank closed that option on the day of the war.

"The only option to buy something abroad is you need US dollars and you cannot buy them," he added. "With crypto, you can buy USDT, a token that backs 1:1 to US dollars. You can buy that with local currency … The transaction takes about 10 minutes. That's it. That's the only option for small-to-medium businesses and regular people like me."

Leading crypto investment and trading firms have also been quick to highlight bitcoin's ability to hedge geopolitical risk. "The war has instigated a tectonic shift that will form the foundations of a multi-decade crypto bull run in time to come,"  said crypto trading firm QCP Capital in a recent note.

While crypto asset manager Bitwise's investment chief Matt Hougan highlighted that bitcoin moved from being a quirky asset class to having a seat at national security discussions as Ukraine raised over $60 million in crypto donations .

Related stories

Lowery takes it a step further. He sees bitcoin as offering "an enormous industrial defense complex" by preserving zero trust and egalitarian control.

A property defense complex

On the podcast, Lowery describes it as "super frustrating" when people try to talk about bitcoin as a strictly financial system, or monetary network because he's looking more at the power of bitcoin through the lens of the hardware, not the software.

"Nations live and die and are created and uncreated by their ability to understand what form this will take and to be good at that game in the future," Lowery said. "This is how we defend everything that we value. People forget this and if a new technology emerges … banning is not an option. You can't ban your adversary from using this."

People have decided to subsidize a new defense industrial complex by buying bitcoin, Lowery said. Now it's up to policy makers to grasp this complex and decide what to do next. 

"Trying to ban this from your country is only going to give your adversary an advantage over you," Lowery said. " Read history … you don't get the option not to turn where this technology takes you."

Bitcoin offers a new property defense option to countries in Lowery's eyes as a means to protect reserves.

"The first option, the most energy efficient, the [cheapest] option to defend your property is a concept we call trust," Lowery said. "I will simply trust my neighbor."

However, he notes there's a security flaw with trust. It's easy to break.

So countries must find other backups to defend their property and sovereignty. One option is technology.

Third-party countries have been forced to subscribe to the regimes of superpowers, like Russia, China and the US. With bitcoin, now they have this enormous opportunity to subscribe to a non-sovereign power, Lowery said.

"If this truly does become the new property defense protocol that everyone subscribes to, then you are posturing yourself to become a superpower for the next 1,000 years," said Lowery on the podcast. "The asymmetric advantage of the first mover cannot be understated."

Countries are most likely to subscribe to bitcoin over other cryptocurrencies because of the security of its energy intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism that underpins the network.

"Energy is good," Lowery said. "The power that you project, the more powerful a hunk of metal that defends your property that protects it against denial-of-service attacks is good. 

"And by the way, this allows you to actually physically stop a denial of service attacker, it's not just a deterrence like proof-of-stake."

So what should the US do ?

He recommends that the US start buying bitcoin to mitigate the impact of other countries possibly weaning themselves off their dependence on the dollar. 

"The United States better posture themselves to benefit from that and you do that by buying bitcoin, so you capture disproportionate value as people flood into it," Lowery said. 

However, this doesn't mean the state should just own bitcoin reserves. The true power of bitcoin is in its decentralized nature and blockchains can become vulnerable if an attacker acquires more than 50% of the hashing power. 

"If only the state is allowed to own this technology then that's a security vulnerability for the citizens," Lowery said. "To protect people against that, they allow us to hold this technology to help decentralize this power projection so that one organization doesn't have 51% control over or at least to decentralize it somewhat."

For Lowery, those countries that are considering banning proof-of-work because of the energy intensity of the process are basically considering disarming themselves.

Check out Business Insider's picks for best cryptocurrency exchanges

• Main content

A Critique of Softwar Concepts

Major Jason Lowery caused quite a stir in August of 2021 when he published a post on LinkedIn claiming that Bitcoin was violence. It certainly rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way, and it earned him a large following shortly thereafter when he joined Twitter.

I hadn't paid much attention to the drama or his claims until recently when more people started asking for my opinion, likely because he has honed the thesis for the past 2 years, has hit the podcast circuit, and recently published his thesis as a book.

To be clear, I have not read the 350 page book that is for sale on Amazon . I find it odd that, given this is an academic thesis, I'm unable to find a PDF of it available anywhere. According to MIT's Thesis Library , theses are received one month after degrees are granted - so it may not be available until July or August. To my knowledge, there's nothing preventing Lowery from self-publishing his thesis right now; apparently he wants the downloads to be tracked through MIT and he wants to have a more impressive metric of being a best selling book on Amazon. Paying $40 for the privilege of receiving the thesis leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as rational discourse should occur in the public domain rather than behind a paywall. As such, the following essay is a result of the notes I took from listening to 10+ hours of Lowery explaining his thesis in a variety of venues. The links to those videos are provided near the end of this essay.

Update : Lowery finally posted a URL to the thesis PDF in response to this essay. I reviewed the thesis in greater detail in the following post:

Hopefully Lowery and his adherents do not resort to retorting that my points are invalid because I haven’t read the book. That’s not how one engages in rational discourse - saying “you can’t criticize me without buying my book” is just a disingenuous marketing tactic . Anyone who employs that deflection on me will be written off as bad-faith actor. I invite those who disagree with this essay to raise specific counterpoints rather than attempting to hand-wave away my criticisms.

TL;DR : Lowery is an intelligent fellow who has crafted a compelling story. I agree with the vast majority of his premises, and I suspect that this is why so many people have bought into the narrative . But the devil is in the details, and in this critique I'll point out several flaws and unanswered questions that leave me unconvinced of his conclusions.

A Critique of Criticism

I have surveyed the landscape of those who have criticized Lowery and found it lacking.

Many folks out there are slinging ad hominem attacks at him due to his military background. Lowery surely loves to see these fallacies coming his way, as it makes his critics look like fools. Everyone is free to contribute their ideas to Bitcoin; it is, in fact, a free market battleground of ideas . Rejecting someone's ideas because of their background is ridiculous.

Similarly, many folks are making emotional arguments about Lowery's characterization of terms like "violence / weapon / force." Once again, this is not the appropriate target to attack with regard to his arguments.

One notable exception is Limpwar , though it’s more of a standalone thesis than what I'll attempt in this essay - a more concise focus on pointing out flaws and logical errors.

Lowery does a good job setting the historical stage. Nature is not friendly to life; all life competes over the scarce resources necessary to survive and thrive. Evolutionary arms races occur organically between predators and prey.

The US military has expanded its domains over time via the Army,  Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. Lowery makes a good point that every form of territory becomes a battleground and he calls cyberspace the "fifth domain" of warfare.

A lot of folks seem to be upset because Lowery describes the natural state of competition over scarce resources as warfare. My perspective is that his main point is that all of nature exists in a state of anarchy. Nation states also exist in a state of anarchy with each other, and military thinking takes this into account.

Bitcoin is crypto anarchy - each node operator chooses the rules to which they agree. Consensus emerges out of chaos; no one has the power to force you into consensus against your will. Beware of those who attempt to convince you that a formalized governance structure exists. — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 15, 2018

Thus, I can see an overlap in terms in the sense that anarchy (systems without rulers) are automatically in a state of perpetual conflict that you could characterize as "warfare." He’s just using terms differently than from what many of us are used to, but from a military perspective they are accurate. This shouldn't be surprising, because as the old saying goes:

"When all you have is a military, everything looks like a war."

Lowery says that currently people attempt to secure data via " some magical combination of logic " and "if-then-else statements" that are coded into software. Well, kind of, but there are a variety of authentication mechanisms that are "encoded logic." There's far more to it than just logic.  This point strikes me as cherry picking and a mischaracterization.

"No amount of logic can protect you from the systemic exploitation of logic."

Technically correct, but this sounds like a strawman argument because cybersecurity is more than just pure logic. I get the general feeling that his depth of knowledge when it comes to cybersecurity is rather shallow. For example, his mispronunciation of sybil attack as "psybill." This suggests to me that he has never spoken with anyone about sybil attacks, nor seen any presentations about them - he has only read about them. Of course, this tidbit is not an argument in and of itself - it’s merely an observation that may help explain why Lowery has made several omissions.

He keeps talking about securing data but I've only actually heard him talk about DoS prevention. Not so much securing data in terms of its integrity. On his most recent interview with Robert Breedlove, Lowery states :

Cybersecurity will have a physical component to it, we're just waiting for that thing.

Yes, cybersecurity does have physical components. No, we're not waiting on them. Allow me to introduce the 3 forms of human authentication:

• Something you know (such as a password)
• Something you have (such as a smart card)
• Something you are (such as a fingerprint or other biometric method)

Note that 2 of the 3 forms of authentication are physical in nature . Though biometrics is arguably a weak single factor of authentication for several reasons I won't get into.

Lowery also makes what I consider to be a pretty weak argument that Bitcoin is defensible via Second Amendment constitutional claims. I'm not a lawyer, but Second Amendment claims have been shot down time and time again - the Supreme Court has clearly stated that there are restrictions. For example, the ownership of fully automatic firearms, explosives, artillery, laser guided missiles, etc, are all not a right under the Second Amendment. When a new innovation appears, such as the bump stock, the BATFE often moves to ban it, and all owners of such devices are required to turn them in or face imprisonment. The Second Amendment only permits Americans to own a very small subset of the weapons available on the market; its "protections" are relatively weak and fickle - it's not something I'd want to rely upon .

First Amendment claims, on the other hand, are far more powerful.

Let us not forget the lessons of the 1990s era Crypto Wars . Strong cryptography was literally classified as a munition (weapon.) How did the Cypherpunks win their legal battles? It was NOT by making Second Amendment claims, but rather via First Amendment claims.

Lowery even goes so far as to make a counterpoint about Zimmerman's PGP export case not setting a precedent for a First Amendment defense. That claim is correct... but he's cherry-picking again. What Lowery doesn't mention is Bernstein v. USDOJ . The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.

I reject Lowery's framing that the legal arguments in the 1990s were made with the Second Amendment in mind. Rather, the claims were that weak encryption was harming the safety and limiting sales and growth of e-commerce. This led to a series of relaxations in US export controls, culminating in 1996 with President Bill Clinton signing Executive order 13026, transferring commercial encryption from the Munition List to the Commerce Control List.

I've yet to hear a proposal of how Lowery’s perspective will lead to new solutions. In general the theory feels quite lacking in terms of practical applications. Lowery speaks very broadly as if this will secure all data in the world, but I don't see the connection. Here's a good summary of Lowery's claim:

For those certain control actions that you don't want to be exploited, like the ability to write the ledger, for example, or the ability to spam you, you want that to be physically constrained.

This claim is compelling because it does describe one facet of how Bitcoin works. But the point of honing and publishing a thesis is to advance an original point of view as a result of research. I have yet to see any examples of Lowery showing how his thesis can be applied to secure non-Bitcoin data.

It's hard for me to imagine a government mining operation operating anywhere near the efficiency of privately funded operations; the profit motivations simply aren't there. Lowery insists that "data defense" motivations exist, but as mentioned, that's a completely missing link in his arguments. He also claims that since the military has a mission to protect the ability of citizens to access economic thoroughfares, this will naturally extend to Bitcoin.

I pose to you that, should Lowery's claims be accepted and adopted by the American military, the "cure" could be worse than the disease. Let's approach Lowery's proposed future adversarially. In a worst case scenario, government miners could operate at a huge (taxpayer-funded) loss and effectively bankrupt privately funded miners all around the world. The only way a nation state can ensure that blockchain data is not censored or overwritten is to control a majority of the network hashrate. But, by doing so, they would be destroying one of Bitcoin's major strengths of its game theory - that hashpower is distributed sufficiently and incentives are aligned such that no entity has a majority of the network hashrate.

One major missing link is that hashing power is not the only mechanism that secures the bitcoin blockchain. There are already many rules and non-mining entities that vastly restrict the data in the blockchain. The hashpower only defends the integrity of said data from a historical perspective.

By focusing on hashpower, he implies that thermodynamic security is the fundamental aspect of the Bitcoin network's security model. This is incorrect and lacks nuance. There are lower levels of Bitcoin's security: the nodes that form the peer-to-peer network and the humans who collectively organize to agree upon what code they will run to secure the network.

This is why Bitcoin is fundamentally not protected by electricity, hashing machines, or even the "logical security" of nodes . Bitcoin is backed by a volunteer militia . The antifragile nature of Bitcoin as an ecosystem is because it's an open source project without a central coordinator.

Nakamoto consensus is a proxy for meatspace consensus. If something's wrong, we fall back to meatspace consensus, patch code, and carry on. — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 6, 2015

Concerningly, Lowery glosses over an entire industry that already exists.

"We've never had this fifth domain through which you could fight wars."

Surely he has heard of United States Cyber Command ?

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

This claim is particularly absurd; cyberwarfare is already a thing . Nation states (and independent black hats) probe the defenses of critical infrastructure on a daily basis. The fact that warfare can be conducted via internet protocols does not magically remove the physical attributes and consequences of cyberattacks. For example:

• In 2021 the Darkside hacking group managed to shut down the Colonial Pipeline - 45% of America's east coast fuel supply - for several days.
• In 2021 a hacker managed to increase the amount of sodium hydroxide, a corrosive chemical, by 100X in a small Florda town's water supply.
• Russian-backed hackers remotely disabled electricity to a wide swath of Ukraine in December 2015. Then they uploaded faulty firmware to make fixing the breach even more difficult.
• In 2014, hackers caused massive damage to a German steel mill by causing them to lose control of a blast furnace.
• From 2007 to 2010 the US physically destroyed Iran's centrifuges that they used to enrich uranium for their nuclear program with a virus called Stuxnet .
• In 2008 a teenager from Lodz, Poland tripped rail switches and redirected trams using a homemade transmitter. His stunt injured twelve people when four trams derailed.
• An Australian man was convicted of hacking into his small town’s computerized waste management system in 2001 and deliberately spilling 265,000 gallons of raw sewage into parks and rivers in the area.

If nation states started running large mining operations, they wouldn't be able to harden that infrastructure in the same way that military / government / utility infrastructure is hardened by partitioning it from the Internet. This infrastructure will have a physical presence and it will necessarily have both physical and digital weaknesses due to the nature of its position in both meatspace and cyberspace. It requires some magical thinking to believe that we can invent a new form of cyberwar devoid of physical consequences.

Cyberspace is an extension (or layer on top) of meatspace, not a completely parallel universe. Just as how Neo could act like a god with little consequences while in the Matrix, if the Sentinels found him in meatspace, it was game over .

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid!)

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. - Variant of a quote by Lord Rutherford of Nelson

Lowery's interview with Peter McCormack was 2.5 hours.

His latest interview with Robert Breedlove was 2.5 hours.

His interview with Marty Bent was 3.5 hours.

There's a whole other 6 hours of What is Money mini-series featuring Lowery.

His book is 350 pages; one Amazon reviewer notes that it doesn't start talking about Bitcoin until page 230.

What if Lowery's thesis itself is a denial of service attack ? It was incredibly time consuming for me to find the flaws in his narrative because they are the proverbial needles in the haystack, and the biggest flaws are not in what he says but in what he doesn't say.

Lowery's presentations are compelling because he accurately portrays (one mechanism of) how Bitcoin defends itself without a central controller. But it falls short on how this applies more broadly to other systems.

Lowery keeps talking about us needing a way to protect our data in cyberspace. After watching 10 hours of him talking, I have yet to see him propose a single practical example of how he envisions accomplishing that . McCormack pushed him for examples but the only one he could come up with was the data in the Bitcoin blockchain itself.

It's such an odd claim that I'll quote Satoshi Nakamoto in response:

Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.

Lowery again, in his recent Breedlove interview :

If you create a new domain that has no mass, which is what cyberspace is, then how do you project power through that domain? If it's got no mass then you can't project power or impose physically prohibitive costs using mass-based power projection technology, so kinetic power projection is out the window. You're not using force to displace mass... it has to be, probably, some type of electromagnetic thing like electricity.

Encryption fundamentally imposes physically prohibitive costs upon attackers. By design, it creates an amazing asymmetric defense capability - that is, it costs practically nothing to encrypt data while decryption costs many orders of magnitude more computational resources - in many cases, more resources than can even be harnessed by our current level of civilization. Lowery may dismiss this point by claiming that encryption is only "using logic," but this is just an issue of private key management. It is quite practical to pull key management security out of the digital realm and into the physical realm via dedicated airgapped hardware.

I'm disappointed because I've yet to see Lowery discuss game theory at the nation state level of mining bitcoin in depth. In this interview he does seem to imply that the Federal Reserve and US Treasury will fail to remain competitive in a world of hyperbitcoinization - that other nation states adopting Bitcoin could result in them destroying the US' monopolization on being the world reserve currency and defender of property rights via projection of power. But in that video he only seems to talk about the Federal government acquiring bitcoin, not mining it as a security play for the integrity of data.

If one of his arguments is that "the US should hedge against the possibility of hyperbitcoinization in order to survive" - I can accept that claim , at least in the scope of money.

But Lowery claims that Bitcoin creates a replacement for the kinetic power projection game and is a threat to the United States' "business model" of exporting property defense across that world. That's some massive hand-waving and I fail to see how the dots get connected between Bitcoin and everything else - there are many other forms of scarce resources than just BTC that we should expect nation states to continue to wage kinetic war over. As noted previously, cyberspace and meatspace are inextricably linked and his vision of non-lethal warfare strikes me as utopistic.

Lowery is a gifted storyteller. He makes logical arguments for why Bitcoin is a better form of money with which governments and central banks won't be able to compete.

It's impressive that he has crafted a narrative that may have a strong chance of getting various government agencies to look more favorably upon Bitcoin. However, and this is crucial: Lowery's focus on Proof of Work is severely lacking because Proof of Work is but ONE of many aspects of Bitcoin's game theory and security model .

I agree with his claims:

• about evolution of systems and power dynamics
• that governments should hold bitcoin as a hedge

I'm skeptical of his claims:

• that governments will be incentivized to mine bitcoin
• that it's desirable for governments to participate in bitcoin mining

I disagree with his claims:

• about cybersecurity
• about the second amendment
• about general data integrity assurances
• that PoW creates a new domain of non-lethal warfare
• that cyberspace warfare will displace kinetic warfare

I like the story arc. I don't buy the conclusion. In fact, the entire thing appears to be a giant non sequitur . That is to say: just because you string together a huge number of valid premises, that does not mean that your inferences are logical.

Perhaps it doesn't matter what I think; I'm not the target audience. However, it is worth considering the implications of what might happen if his target audience accepts and adopts this thesis.

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