All right. So Lucas and I are here today for the next conversation, the next study session over soft war, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin. This is Jason Lowry's thesis, and we have a PDF of that.
So this is the fifth conversation, I believe. We've had an introduction and then a few chapters before that. So to really back up and then we'll walk into it, kind of the core argument of the thesis is something like Bitcoin represents a soft, as in a non-kinetic form of warfare that could be used to counteract the dysfunctions of abstract power hierarchies that emerge in digital age society.
So there's a lot of terms in that, and we've learned some of those terms up to this point.
Two conversations ago, we talked about power projection tactics in nature.
That was chapter three.
There's a lot there, but essentially what emerged is that physical power projection is used to determine resource allocation within a dominance hierarchy for pack animals, a sort of pecking order to determine who gets breeding and feeding rights.
physical power is used within that dominance hierarchy in order to determine those feeding
and breeding rights in a decentralized zero trust and permissionless fashion um then we moved on to
the next chapter which was power projection tactics in human society and there's a continuous line
from animals to humans and indeed um lowry draws it from inorganic matter to organic matter single
up to animals. The whole story is an evolutionary story. It's very fascinating. So last time we
talked about power projection in human society on a continuous line from animals. And in the same way,
human society begins using physical power projection also to determine humans are pack
animals. So we have the need to allocate resources within the pack. We have a dominance hierarchy.
We also, just like animals, use physical power to determine feeding and breeding rights within that
hierarchy, a pecking order of who gets what, a sort of property rights system where property
is defined by who is willing to project power over it. However, humans have the ability to
think abstractly, which leads us to have a theory of mind and to empathize with our other kin and
also with other animals. And so we want to avoid physical violence. And so in an effort to avoid
physical confrontations, humans develop belief systems in which a story is told that centralizes
power, and that creates kind of a ruler and a ruled class with the thought being that the ruler
dispenses permission to access property, and the ruled class simply wants to avoid physical
confrontation, so they buy into the belief system. In turn, they get a dominance hierarchy that
doesn't employ explicit physical violence. They don't have to challenge somebody for resources.
instead permission is allocated to people based on rank within that abstract power-based hierarchy
it's called abstract power because it's not physical power it's not real world strength
or intelligence it's simply determined by kind of the rule set of that abstract power-based
hierarchy like a religion or a government which dispenses permission to people to access
property within society the feeding and breeding rights kind of broadly stated abstract power-based
hierarchies we learned are easy to construct. All you have to do is believe in them. And so they
scale quickly. We get nation states as these big stories that are told based on abstract power.
Someone buys into them simply by believing them. But we learned that abstract power-based hierarchies
have problems. They tend to consolidate centralized power and so become oppressive
over the people within them because it's kind of feeding and breeding rights are determined by rank,
by kind of arbitrary allocations that don't correlate to strength and intelligence, that
don't correlate to merit. And so over time, abstract power-based hierarchies tend to become
centralized and oppressive, and so foster, foment revolution from within to break them up by people
who are fed up with the arbitrariness of power, or to encourage invasion from without, because
abstract power-based hierarchies, by avoiding physical confrontation, also tended to self-domesticate
the people that bought into them because it wasn't merit meritocratically selecting for
power for strength or intelligence so the kind of the story that we learned was physical power
became necessary um even for humans who have developed these ideas of abstract power-based
hierarchies to break those up so now we move into chapter five power projection tactics in cyberspace
so the title kind of sets up what's going to be the problem um cyberspace is this new realm it's
immaterial and non-physical? How can you project power into a immaterial and non-physical realm?
So Lowry starts off, we get some fascinating histories within this section, including a history
of computing. So I have no specialized education in computer science or anything like that. So I'll
do my best to walk us through this kind of aligning, omitting things that are interesting,
but extraneous to kind of telling the narrative that's going to get us to the thesis of this
section, which is that Bitcoin is a novel form of power projection within cyberspace.
So the history of computing that we start out with, though, so computers, broadly speaking,
right, computers are named after their function, they compute, and not their form. So computers
can take many different forms. And we have this development of computers over time, to
a sort of abstract state where machine code is developed that converts computing from a
physical machine process to an abstract design process. We replace these gigantic computers that
are lever pulling or feeding cards into them to computers that are run by a semantically and
syntactically rich language of code. Basically, we develop the ability to speak to machines,
and they can speak back to us in our own language. So software emerges as an abstract belief system
within this. It's not a physical thing. It's a form of top-down belief-based control of hardware,
essentially. Software, it's kind of analogous to it is an abstract power-based hierarchy that
controls hardware. It's top-down abstract control over the physical based purely on
permission-granting power that abstract power-based hierarchies depend on.
And computer programmers are storytellers. They construct these belief systems that is software. They create a fictional world. Software presents us with now an object-oriented vision of cyberspace or of the computer world where we see folders on our desktop.
We see a trash bin. We interact as if things are real, but it's all an abstraction. It's all a story that's told within a piece of software to immerse us in a world created by the storyteller who is the computer programmer.
um so software generates or is an abstract power-based hierarchy we can see this in like
facebook google twitter amazon the admins over these systems have sort of like god king rights
to determine how things function within the system um how the resources within those systems are
allocated etc software so we're really interested we're entering an age cyberspace is obviously
immensely important to us. We have digital resources now, not just physical real world
resources to be allocated. Those who control the software typically control how they're like the
centralized power that dispenses the permission and controls the dominance hierarchy about who
gets what digital right and the property who has control and custody over digital rights,
digital property. These digital resources, most broadly stated, digital resources might be like
the computer itself, the data, our data in the computer, which can be sensitive financial data,
or the data about how we interact on something like Facebook, which creates a behavioral surplus
that is then sold back to us as monetized advertisements. So our data is something very
valuable and it's a type of digital resource that is controlled by an abstract power-based
hierarchy, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon.
Musicians and artists obviously produce, have digital resources in the form of their artistic
products, access to financial system and banking.
These are like digital resources online.
So an abstract power-based hierarchy is based on creating a belief system where others are
required to get your permission to do something or to exercise control over a piece of
property, and that's what software does. Lowry is telling us, in the narrative of this section,
is so that we come to see how software is an abstract power-based hierarchy. It is a form
of storytelling. But as an abstract power-based hierarchy, we see the emergence of the same
sorts of problems we saw earlier relating to abstract power-based hierarchies in human societies,
like religions and governments.
I'll read a quote here from Lowry.
Convince the population to use and believe in your software,
and you can have unconstrained levels of abstract power
and control authority over them that is so asymmetric
it could rival that of Egyptian pharaohs.
So we see then the development of the two types of problems
with abstract power-based hierarchy.
There's the oppression from within and the possibility of invasion
from without, from external sources. So the oppression from within, software as an abstract
power-based hierarchy centralizes power, gives the god-king admin rights to a ruling class that
is the proprietor of the software or whatever, the operator of the software. These people then
have permission-granting powers. They can ban, surveil, control, debank. They can run social
experiments on us, A-B testing by presenting us with different versions of the software to learn
behaviorally how we react and thereby learn how to control us. They can censor, they can term
things misinformation, they can engage in algorithmic manipulation of what we see,
they can steer how individuals even make sense of their objective reality because that
ends up being an extension of our abstract knowledge that we gain through Facebook and
Twitter. We then use that to interpret the real physical world. So there's that impression from
within that can occur when we have these softwares that centralize power as an abstract power-based
hierarchy. There's also invasion from without, weaponized misinformation, troll farms, bot farms,
civil attacks, denial of service attacks, hacking epidemics often involving nation states.
The software, bad actors can attack them, and we're kind of powerless to that because we've been self-domesticated within the software. We've given up all enforcement control and power, ability to use power to the admin controllers of the software.
um there's also a sort of modern empire building because uh software is transnational now they have
facebook operates in other countries in other countries as does twitter so there's this
consolidation centralization of power that subjects that makes us subject to oppression
and possible invasion in the forms that i've mentioned um so software only like any abstract
power-based hierarchy depends upon logical constraints in order to kind of establish
a rule of law within that software and determine grant permission and establish the dominance
hierarchy over the digital resources. But logical constraints have lots of failure points
because software is a very complex thing with many different emergent behaviors. There's many
possible hazardous states that are often not identified. There's also a software culture
Lowry describes of abstraction, because the way that software engineering has developed is that
we have these incredibly complex coding languages that are abstracted to make them easier to use,
which leads to a loss of information by the person manipulating these kind of
of higher level abstracted forms, which again, renders software as kind of having these emergent
states that can be hazardous and unpredictable and so manipulable. Of course, also, there's just
the fact that Facebook, Twitter, Google, they're centralized and the admin is the god king again,
who can just change things as they want. We've seen in the past too, in the other chapters,
When physical power is not used, populations become domesticated because they depend upon the software or the abstract power-based hierarchy to determine all of the disputes and strength and intelligence are not rewarded and so not employed.
And here we're confronted with the obstacle that it seems impossible to project physical power into cyberspace to discipline these abstract power-based hierarchies, to break them up, to decentralize them, to get us to stop them from oppressing us, to protect them from invasion through civil attacks, denial of service attacks, etc.
I'll read another quote from Lowry.
With the way the internet is currently architected, users operating in cyberspace are automatically domesticated as the architecture necessary to project physical power to physically constrain belligerent actors is currently missing, in parentheses, at least it was before the invention of Bitcoin.
In the past, with human societies, warfare as a form of physical power projection was used to decentralize. We stood up to oppressive god kings, killed the pharaohs or whatever. Abstract power hierarchies became less oppressive. We transitioned from monarchies to democracies. But it seems like physical power is not available in the same way in the realm of cyberspace.
So this is really Lowry's big point. Software is going to give rise to soft war. We need a cyber warfighting protocol to enable warfighting within cyberspace, something that will decentralize, allow us to project physical power into the cyberspacial realm, the virtual realm, to decentralize, rebalance, and constrain oppressive software, which are abstract power-based hierarchies that are consolidating power.
If a software protocol is not adopted, entire nations could become subservient to, quote, an elite technocratic ruling class, either domestically or from a foreign power.
So Lowry really wants to talk about Bitcoin, more abstractly speaking, whether it's possible to have something that will project power in, from, and through cyberspace.
He uses that phrase in, from, and through a lot.
So it's kind of probably interesting or important to grab onto that and reflect on what that means.
But what does it mean to project power in, from, and through cyberspace?
Well, we do have current physical power.
We have some physical power constraints that are non-Bitcoin related that preceded that.
You can remove USB drives to prevent people from stealing data.
You can carry encrypted keys and access cards.
You can have air-gapped networks.
But these forms of physical constraint of the virtual or software don't constrain others' computers, and they don't constrain kind of the god kings to which we have bought into their abstract power-based hierarchies by downloading their software and entering into Facebook or Twitter.
so what is the key proof of work is the key and Lowry talks about proof of work kind of aside
from bitcoin initially but it's he's really I think focusing on bitcoin and that that does I
think become evident he does talk about bitcoin directly but proof of work is the important part
for this section without specifying bitcoin up front he says he puts the challenge this way
There is a strategic imperative for nation states to be on the lookout for the development of any kind of open source physical power projection protocol, which empowers people to physically constrain or, quote, chain down other people's computer programs in, from, and through cyberspace.
cyberspace. A protocol like this would be of national strategic significance because it would
represent the discovery of a globally adopted physical security protocol for cyberspace
and an unprecedented new cybersecurity capability. So that's the national strategic imperative.
That's what he's looking for, something to chain down other people's computers in,
from, and through cyberspace. This is something that he's going to talk and develop as a way to
bridge the cyber world and the real world. He quotes Sailor to open a portal between these two
different realms, a bi-directional influence between the virtual and the real. He then talks
about this electrocyberdome, Bitcoin as an electrocyberdome security, piece of security.
I think it's helpful just to visualize it that way, because that's going to give some mental
traction onto this idea of what it means to have a form of power projection within the
cyber spatial realm. So imagine like a dome or a wall between your computer and other computers,
all spam and incoming control signals are then rejected, unless they have a proof of work receipt,
a proof of having expended energy in order to have to validate and get permission.
So the features of an electro cyber security dome within cyberspace is that it would be a passive,
like a wall, non-kinetic, no force displacing mass, non-kinetic, that's what it means.
It's not a bomb blowing up, so there's no bodies on the ground, no physical harm.
It makes denial of service attacks costly, and it constrains other computers, meaning
it also constrains other programmers, the god kings that we might be concerned about,
who are telling us a story through their software, and which we are possibly being oppressed
by if the story is to be believed. So Bitcoin has a cyberdome. Bitcoin has a ledger behind a wall
that's protected from attack in this way, and it has 14 years of runtime. So
Lowry mentions Bitcoin as employing this electrocyberdome security concept.
um computation lowry notes didn't develop this way because previously
computation has been optimized to be faster more efficient smaller and cheaper so early computers
had large plug boards to move things around to change the type of special purpose state it was
trying to compute, as I understand. Modern computers, we've just got compressed that and
made that more abstracted and less physical. Instead of large plug board, modern computers
employ floating gate transistors. We know that chips are getting smaller and smaller,
more efficient, cheaper, faster. So computing is an abstraction that's becoming more and more
unmoored from real-world constraint. And so there's an abstract power-based hierarchy that's
scaling quickly alongside this dematerialization of computation. So Lowry asks, what if we thought
about reverse optimizing to make computation, to make it larger and more energy-intensive?
And then this brings on a really interesting idea, and I'll try to do the best I can to flesh it out, but there's a lot to it, which is Bitcoin as a planetary computer as a way to chain down the virtual and cyberspacial realm and open a bidirectional portal between what is virtual and what is real, what is abstract and what is objective to change both for the better, as I think we'll see.
um so what does it mean for bitcoin to be a planetary computer i'm going to kind of radically
condense this and we can expand upon it in conversation it represents a process by which
the world's power grid roughly speaking is converted into bits of information society
our whole agrarian society becomes part of the internet's hardware so again a process by which
the world's power grid is converted into bits of information real world physical energy converted
into bits. This has the emergent impact of chaining cyberspace to the real world. Again,
opening a portal and changing the nature of both cyberspace and real space in a bi-directional way.
So the thought is the internet, by chaining it down to the real world, to the power grid,
to energy production, is going to change cyberspace to make it physically scarce
instead of
kind of spam abundance,
copy paste, a software admin
can do whatever they want
and can replicate something
as many times as they want. We're going to have physical
scarcity imported into the cyberspace
realm. It's going to be decentralized.
It's, again,
a planetary computer
based on the power grid, pieces of which
are controlled by different nations and persons
and entities, not run by
one god king granting admin rights to computation. It's also going to be zero trust. The internet
now will be zero trust. You don't need to rely on a trusted third party for permission or access.
Anybody can participate in that power grid plugging into converting energy into bits.
This would also have a metacognitive impact. People will change the way they perceive cyberspace,
perceiving it not as a manipulated dream state that you don't really understand what's going on
under the hood. Instead, you're going to see it as something maybe more real.
But it's also bi-directional. Once the virtual is chained to the real by chaining it to our power
grid, the real world is going to change as well. The power grid is going to be built out. New energy
tech is going to be developed because energy efficiency is going to be important innovations
to help people provide more energy in order to convert them into bits.
And it also may affect even our belief systems, the way we interact with the world.
There's a lot of conversations about that, about a fiat mindset versus a mindset once
the real world is tied to the virtual and they're both shown to have scarcity and made more real by
a proof of work protocol that connects the two. So that gets us to Bitcoin. So in talking about,
so up until now, I've been trying to just talk about the cybersecurity dome as like abstract
proof of work or whatever within the bitcoin pro within bitcoin lowry begins by first what i think
is a really important point um for his argument is that coin itself within bitcoin is an arbitrary
semantic designation so that we call it a coin has a monetary significance but that's doesn't
it's just an arbitrary way that it's one way that we that we've talked about one of the possible
uses, but it's, in Lowry's estimation, Bitcoin is not primarily a monetary protocol, but rather
a BitPower protocol, which is a term he prefers instead of coin, Bitcoin is BitPower. BitPower
represents the real world cost of solving proof of work, physically costly equations.
BitPower represents state changes occurring outside of our computer that are converted
into bits on the computer. So within bit power, quantities of power are drawn from the planet,
the power is then converted into bits of information by hashing machines and bits are
abstracted as coins. But again, we could call them refer to them as bit power. So that's different
than traditional software in which bits are not derived from real world energy expenditure,
something that's provably costly, but are instead kind of a dream hallucination or story that is
told and controlled and manipulated at will by software admins.
Bitpower in this way Lowry believes could become the foundational layer of the internet because it is chained to the real world physically constrained and decentralized And the bottom line is that for the first time people appear to have discovered through proof of work how to project physical power in from and through cyberspace by converting
global power itself into bits. So again, that's the problem. How do you project physical power
into cyberspace? And proof of work is what Lowry thinks does that. In doing so, you don't have to
rely on an abstract power-based hierarchy with logical constraints because that leads to
oppression and invasion. Instead, we have the ability to project power into the physical world.
Lowry said in a tweet that if you could summarize the book in a single sentence, it would be,
Bitcoin isn't just a new form of money, it's a new form of warfare. So that's soft war. That's
the new form of warfare. Bitcoin as a novel form of cyber warfare. And here, I think this brings
And the other interesting aspect of Lowry's thesis is that it's a solution to kinetic warfare. So Bitcoin as software creates a non-lethal equivalent to warfare that's going to have the same emergent benefits of traditional warfare, which is, again, to break up abstract breakup or discipline abstract power-based hierarchies through a zero trust, permissionless, and egalitarian way of projecting power.
instead of relying on permission granting rights from the ruling class,
the God King admin who determines who has control of what digital resource.
It's going to, Bitcoin as a solution, as software, as a solution to kinetic warfare,
is going to remove mass from power competitions.
Two armies competing are moving mass to fight each other and swap it with energy.
So he draws from the metaphor he developed in previous chapters of antlers, that antlers are a form of power projection that deers use within their dominance contests in order to allow them to project physical power, but also to buffer the use of that so that it doesn't harm them as much.
Bitcoin is antlers for us in that it allows physical power to be projected, but does so in a non-kinetic form.
This has military significance. So the core function of a military is to control trade routes.
For example, the Navy controls trade routes over the ocean.
Lowry then likens cyberspace to an ocean, a place in which there are trade routes and transfers of data that need to be secured.
So we can imagine a hash force, a service dedicated to projecting physical power to preserve a country's freedom of action in, from, and through cyberspace,
They secure their data transfer, secure the data financial, but also data of other types.
Bitcoin as a solution is solving the problem of the kinetic standoff, the kinetic stalemate that we find ourselves in because we've scaled kinetic power beyond our ability to practically use it by developing strategic nuclear arms.
and this has led us to countries that fight really only they solve minor disputes through
less efficient kinetic power projection tactics like small-scale proxy conflicts
but even these Lowry says will eventually be scaled out of practical application
through development of things possibly like AI-powered drones so this we're quickly scaling
all ways to kinetically engage in power projection among nation states because they're becoming
forms of mutually assured destruction. But this is, again, where soft war comes in,
a novel form of warfare, in order to allow us to solve, to not arrive at a stalemate because
we can still project power. It bypasses that kinetic power paradox because Bitcoin and proof
of work allows for infinite scaling. You can keep on plugging more and more power into it
without loss of human life. It also is not a stalemate because it allows for winners and
losers. To quote Lowry in the past, quote, the more society tries to avoid war, the more
Or they must adopt systemically insecure, trust-based, inegalitarian, permission-based cooperation systems like abstract power hierarchies, which tend to break down and lead directly back to war.
So abstract power-based hierarchies used to be that solution to war, but that leads to centralization, oppression, and self-domestication.
The solution is mutually assured preservation.
Bitcoin as softwar allows power summing cooperation without trust-based centralization. So before, with nuclear arms, you would have two great powers. You'd have treaties and alliances, nations getting together to construct abstract power conglomerations, consolidations, consolidating and centralizing power in a way that leads to oppression.
um but with bitcoin again bitcoin allows power summing cooperation without
trust-based centralization we don't by participating in bitcoin everybody's basically
fighting using the same machine our opponents are participating when they add power when they
project power through proof of work they actually strengthen bitcoin overall so that all that
participating in it are actually cooperating and benefiting. It's an interesting idea that we're
all fighting the war using the same machine once Bitcoin and its proof of power aspect are, if they
are considered a form of soft war, allowing us to project power to secure trade routes, the
cyberspacial realm. Again, so by competing in the permissionless access to the network, that is
Bitcoin, we increase the cost of attack to the network. By our opponents participating, they also
increase the cost of attack to the network. And so it scales and cooperation is actually
decentralizing. So software is a novel form of warfare that enables kinetic physical power
competition that scales infinitely and which encourages a sort of cooperation that is actually
decentralizing rather than centralizing. I think that's roughly where this chapter ends, which ends
the theoretical part of this book.
And the next chapter is going to move on to,
I believe, concrete recommendations
that if we accept this thesis as true,
that Bitcoin is a novel form of power projection
enabling this sort of cooperative summing
of even our opponent's power in this version of software,
what are the policy recommendations?
So this, again, so Lucas, I know there's a lot there.
And we both, of course, read through this work through this thought through this.
But I definitely, as I mentioned, I left things out that were of interest in order to try to just tell the straight through narrative.
But but I think that's that's the best I can do for for this chapter.
And again, just to say the best I can do it.
And I don't think that this chapter is like digressively.
It was bad in some in some sense and that it's too digressive or whatever.
The grounded theory methodology encourages this kind of layering of these different types of thought and the use of memos that are then compiled.
So there's a lot of information that's coming into here, and that's one way to put it together the way I just did, I guess.
the grounded theory methodology provides a lot of vectors of attack for the idea so that when we
discuss this idea because he is coming at it from so many different directions from biology from
human society and psychology warfare you know from all of these different angles
it strengthens the final summation of the idea, right?
Where you've got support for it on all sides from everything.
But it does make the process, I mean, like what a laborsome process to do this.
And he mentioned in the methodology, you know, that there's like an inherent fear
when you're using a grounded theory methodology, because it's like, you know, there's so much that
I can draw from the world is my oyster, but then that becomes what I think is the inherent flaw of
abstractions applied in cyberspace, which is unlimited choice. So unlimited choice to defend
the idea here, but getting around to why we're talking about proof of work and how it ties the
physical realm to the abstracted cyberspace realm is that when you enter into that realm,
because we removed the physical component of the computing process and we made general purpose
computers, you no longer had to create these specific use machines. What the computer could do
was only limited by the imagination of the person programming it. And I think we really see that
in the world that we see of abstractions applied to cyberspace, where it truly became,
what is the most imaginative thing that I can do? You know, and so now we, that's why we had,
you know, AI generated, you know, you could, you could overdub anybody and you can do that.
That's why we have that before we have something useful, which would be like your AI doctor or your AI psychologist therapist.
I know that those are in the realm, but I would say that they're a little further behind.
And it was because, you know, like you draw the dreamers.
Like if the domain that you're playing in is abstraction and if it is only limited by your imagination, then who are you going to draw?
Who is going to be inclined to participate in that?
And it's going to be the people with the greatest imagination, not necessarily the people who are most grounded, who are taking an engineer's approach of how can I do the most good with this?
How can I forward humanity with this? Instead, you know, that's what we that's what we wanted.
That's what I think I would hope we all we all deserve.
But instead, what we got was, you know, a way to post your selfies and poke somebody on a social media site.
And it's catching up. It's, you know, now that we have proof of work and we can put the real world and the physical world
and tie them together in a way that instead of being top-down abstract hierarchy control,
it's bottoms up, power coming from the bottom and forcing the abstraction.
And it's useful.
That's what we're finding, right?
And it's not just a theory or a guess or a opinion to say it's useful.
It's useful based on the fact that it's almost a $2 trillion asset 14 years after inception where it was passed between some guys who were trading Magic the Gathering playing cards.
To go from there to where it is now, value is where people put value.
They value that thing.
And so it's turning out to be useful in that it's growing so fast.
It's being voluntarily adopted.
It's not forced upon people.
Nobody has to use Bitcoin.
But if you're in the United States or if you're in a country with a legal tender law, you have to use what they give you, which is effectively, again, it all goes back to Watts.
It's their form of power projection, which is the encapsulation of the energy into this abstraction, which is a little five and a quarter inch piece of green paper.
So, again, there's so many different paths to take on this.
Yeah, there's one thing you mentioned.
I wanted to double back on this because I think this will help us sort out part of this theory and get to one of the interesting things.
You mentioned that Bitcoin, and this was just kind of a glib way that you expressed it, enforces abstraction.
But in Lowry's theory, it's that Bitcoin, bit power is, in Lowry's estimation, not an abstraction.
It's a real world, it's the real world expenditure of power.
And it's interesting to think about the role that abstraction plays in this thesis generally maybe,
But in this chapter, software is an abstract power-based hierarchy.
Software is deployed through abstraction.
And its abstraction is one of the ways that it is able to oppress us kind of without us knowing.
For example, so one of the examples is like a folder is an abstraction on your computer.
You literally obviously don't have a folder on your desktop.
And desktop, again, is an abstraction.
These are ways that we describe something through a metaphor, even though that metaphor is just an abstraction based on one use that enables us to interact with it.
And Lucas, you mentioned like in Facebook, there's pokes. That's an abstraction. But what these abstractions do, what a poke does is it gives information about our desires, wants, dreams to the operators of the software, the God Kings.
It describes our behavior to them in a way more intimate than we even realize.
It's been said that through Facebook, they can predict who's going to enter into romantic relationships and things like this.
We're giving so much of ourselves to Facebook because we see it innocently as a poke, as just like, oh, I'm just touching.
We take these abstractions literally.
Facebook seems to us as a book of faces.
We go from one profile to the next and see people, but they're not people.
These are just abstractions that we're interacting with and giving behavioral data to a giant corporation, which then is able to use that data to predict our future behavior, mold our future behavior, or even give that to the government so a government can do that.
One final abstraction in that kind of tier of abstractions that are ways in which software can be used to oppress us is the example that Lowry gives is the designation cloud as a place where we put our data.
Oh, I'm just sending my data into the cloud, into heaven.
You know, I'm just putting it into a neutral space that's like not accessible to humans, not controlled by humans.
It's like, no, the cloud is you're putting your sensitive data on a trusted third party server, computer, whatever.
They have your data.
It's based on trust.
It's not a cloud.
It's not literally a place where the data goes.
These are all abstractions that we self-domesticate and accept because we think that there's no way for us to opt out of these abstract power-based hierarchies for something more real.
And so I think that that's an integral part of understanding Lowry's thesis is understanding the way that abstract power-based hierarchies are just incredibly insidious, including when they seem more real in the form of software.
Like software is not a thing.
We don't load it on our computer.
It's just like it's a language that's describing a reality to us.
Yeah.
Yeah, this has long been a theory of mine that it's so much easier to pull off a conspiracy now than it would have been 50 years ago, 60 years ago.
You know, when the incoming administration goes into office, we may find out who killed Kennedy.
But undoubtedly, I think there was some conspiracy involved somehow.
Right. Like there were people who had to do things, who had to bribe people or pressure people or do something like that.
But I've thought about, you know, thinking about the assassination attempt on Trump.
And I remember when it happened and I actually called you right right then.
I remember you were driving to Kansas and I was driving to Washington.
And what I remember thinking instantly about that was you saw this flood of people saying conspiracy, conspiracy, and the deep states trying to do this and that.
And what I realized, like, I mean, just watching myself online, just watching other people online, how my behavior and my attitude can be influenced by what I see.
it's no doubt in my mind that if you wanted to do something like that, literally all you would
need to do is use what you know about the person and their interactions and then flood their feed
with things that would set them off. And you're like, Hey, I've got a candidate pool of 20,000
people that I may be able to, you know, and all I need to do is get one person to go crazy.
And so it does, as you say, make it so much more insidious because this is just a keystroke. This is not Jolly West going to visit, I can't remember who it was, but the guy from the head of the CIA's mind control unit going to visit the guy who supposedly killed Kennedy before and then also visiting the guy who killed the guy who killed Kennedy.
like it it doesn't even take that it just takes a keystroke uh you know some imagination really
because that's what it was was someone imagined what this algorithm could be how you could draw
all these things like they say amazon i think knows a couple weeks before a woman knows when
they're pregnant based on how their orders change and stuff and six years ago i sat and i heard one
of Amazon's marketing people talk about how they had over 2 million data points on every single
person who shopped there. And I'm sure it's probably an order of magnitude more now. And so
as they continue to refine that, then yes, it comes back to it's trust-based. Like you,
you just have to trust that they're not going to use that for nefarious purposes. But the problem
is every single time in every single domain in history that someone has trusted and authority
that trust is in broken. Like it's, they're batting a thousand on, on, on breaking trust.
You know, that you can't name, I don't think one example of any sort of institution or any sort of,
you know, data gathering company. That's, that's, I mean, they can't, they just can't be in the best
interest of their customers because they're in the best interest of the company first. And if
they're a public company, then they're in the best interest of their, you know, they're doing their
fiduciary responsibility and they're fighting for whatever's in the best interest of their
shareholders. So it's not evil per se in that it's evil people that are doing this. It's that the
system inherently rewards that type of behavior. It brings in the imagineers with their giant
dreams and what all we can do. And then it gets tied to a profit incentive. And that profit
incentive is then tied to a relationship with the authority of the hierarchy in such a way that
the benefit to cost ratio of further pushing the edge continues to stay high, where you have
regulatory capture of these companies, and then you also have government influence and meddling.
It's kind of weird that there's a former CIA operative on the board of every single social
media company. Um, you know, so, but you, so you, you take all those things and you put them
together, you know, you've got the imagination and you've got the profit incentive and you've got
the lack of punishment, um, for, for doing something wrong. And like, I mean, what would
you expect would happen? Like, you know, it's like you add those parts up together and, and it's,
it's not unexpected what happens it it's not evil it's no definitely you know it's a system
that produces this evil that if we take this system to a new domain and we're able to tie it to
um a benefit to cost ratio that is reasonable um then not only does it um halt the option
Like it's, it's, it's not just, do we remove the reward for insidious behavior? It's that simply by removing the reward for insidious behavior, we insert a reward for, um, cooperative behavior and aligned incentives where the more people who, um, put power, put bit power to the network, the better it is for every single person and not, and not proportionately.
Like it's just as important and Michael Saylor benefits just as much by the protection of people adding power as I do and as you do.
Like it's all the same wall.
You know, there's no hierarchy there.
There's no preference.
There's no like, you know, like what's the world we live in?
And it's a class-based world, and the class is determined based on how much money you have.
Yeah, yeah.
And so the laws don't equally apply to people of high means.
They have money to change everything.
The bank account determines the punishment effectively.
But in Bitcoin, the bank account is the same for – like it's not the same amount.
but they're protected under the law the same way, the law of power.
No, definitely.
I mean, I think you're just so, like, it's really correct to say that people are not evil on this account,
that evil itself is a theological idea.
And Lowry has told us an evolutionary story about humans,
an evolutionary account that is beyond good and evil,
that is about how we've arrived to be apex predators.
And like you mentioned, incentives for an apex predator or what matter.
It's not that an apex predator is good or evil when it is predatory over other people,
other entities, over the resources.
That's just what it does.
Humans are apex predators.
Lowry mentions that there are systemic predators.
Like humans have adapted.
There are storytelling predators. You know, we're a very intelligent species that's not evil, maybe something that's even worse. We're just able to use our faculties to exploit dominance hierarchies by telling a story that is, again, creating an abstract power-based hierarchy.
You mentioned one other thing I wanted to jump back to that I thought was really interesting. I think it draws from this idea that there's always a bidirectional influence between the virtual and the real, between the abstract and the objective worlds.
the nature of that bidirectional relationship changes if we opt for a proof of work linkage
between the virtual and the real. If Bitcoin is a electro cyber dome that is protecting us
from the most nefarious aspects of the virtual. But without that, you mentioned, you know,
So our clicks becoming manifestations of psychological aspects of us which are then used to develop an algorithm to nudge us in different directions And I mean we can imagine again like in response to the you mentioned Trump
the assassination attempt on Trump, it's not too, you know, one can construct conspiracy theories
where people are nudged into assassination attempts, because like software admins, God kings
can so perfectly create an abstract software environment for a person
that that becomes their objective world.
They see a political figure demonize, demonize,
that this person is the next Hitler or whatever,
and then that bleeds back into the real world.
And the abstract, again, this bidirectional portal,
the abstract world that is completely created and controlled
by centralized software is then dominating physical reality too.
And so it's this incredibly malevolent phenomena to have a cyberspace
when we are an ape that tends to confuse the abstract and the real.
Yeah.
He does such a good job of not only pointing out that flaw,
but of pointing out why that flaw exists.
And like it would exist anyway, but he gives the reasoning for so anybody who learns how to code can code.
And there was such a high demand for people who wanted to code that you didn't have people who were grounded in principles of computer science who were, you know, kind of understood, understood that system security.
So again, so all the way back to power projection, what's the most important thing for a country to do? Enforce its borders. Because if a country doesn't enforce it, if it doesn't have a border, it's not a country, right?
Like, I mean, that's such a, that's such a, I know a based thought, but it's also so real.
Like if you, if you don't have borders, you literally do not have a country.
You just have, you know, it's, you're just kind of deeper into this and less into this,
but there's no delineation.
And so take that idea and put borders around your software.
And if you don't have a system security approach first, then you don't have software.
What you have is bait, really.
So if there's any value to it, that someone will come and take that.
And so he talks about not only like two big problems that led to this, such a high demand
for computer engineers and programmers that you can just learn how to do it.
You can learn the language but not know any of the laws kind of that are applied to system security.
And the other part is just the manner in which computer programmers actually code,
which is that you keep removing information until you're only left with the thing that you're working on.
And so, and I did a little terrible coding for a little bit. So I know I understand this concept, which is that it's just Russian nesting dolls where, you know, the, the clear, clear final thing is like, um, this is the text that you see. And then here is like the, um, the way that it's, or here's like the, the font that it's in.
and here's the color that it's in and here's the um the size that it's in and then here's the way
it appears on the screen like is it is it uh wide or is it tall or you know like is it in a column
etc so and it makes sense because you're you're trying to focus you're trying to work on this
one thing and to have all that other information is very distracting and so what you do is you
create all of these different components, all these little Russian nesting dolls, and
you only work on one at a time.
And because software engineers are very, I was going to try to think of a very fun word
for this, polyamorous, I would say, when it comes to their employers.
That just makes me think of SBF stuff.
So anyway, but anyway, so because they are, it's kind of a commodity.
Right. So like the component that somebody designs for my my workout app, that exact same same component may be reused on another job where it's on my banking app.
and if there's a flaw in the one on the on this app then there's a flaw in the other one and so
it becomes where uh one problem can spread to many many many many different products and
and open up tons of different attack vectors where it's like it's not just a hole in the fence
it's like a hole in this fence means a hole in 3 000 other fences yeah um and so it opens
really opens things up like it it makes the importance of system security so much more
important because like i said it's not just one hole in the fence like if you make that one mistake
you can apply it over, you know, over time. And, and like you, I know, I know computer programmers,
like you talk to them and it's like, when was the last time they updated, uh, the, the dependencies?
And a lot of them are like, yeah, like five years, you know, like, so, so if there was a problem
from something back then, and a lot of times these things don't get touched and they don't
get watched. And so not only is the idea of the abstracted hierarchy, not only is that, um,
inherently, uh, biased towards, uh, um, grifters and charlatans. Um, but it's, it's amplified,
um, so much. And, and by the way, we like, we saw that, like we see it right now, um, with all of
the other types of cryptocurrencies that come out where they're all, not all, I'm, I'm, I know that
there's some good pro or some intentional, maybe honest attempts there, but a lot of them are just
literal rub pulls, like it's literal charlatans and grifters trying to make money on people.
And this brings me to what I think is so interesting. So he talks about how the brain
is inclined to produce false positives. And what that means in a walking along the woods,
seeing a stick is that it keeps you safe, right? Because you see the stick and you think it's a
snake because you want it to be a snake because you want it to be, uh, or you, you, you want to
make, you want to err on the side of caution. So you, you want to believe, right? You want to
believe that that thing is a stick because believing that thing is a stick keeps you safe.
Here's the problem. When you apply the same, uh, the same, uh, um, propensity for false positives
to storytelling domain instead of a real world domain, when you apply it to the abstract domain,
what that does is it makes us want to believe the story. And so we're inclined to be taken
advantage of by charlatans and grifters. We want to believe that. And it's the greatest joy of being
human is to believe in a story and to feel what it is and to be moved by it. But also in the abstract
domain, it turns from being a protection mechanism to a threat vector. And like it opens us up and
it's so wild because it's the thing that keeps us safe in the real world makes us vulnerable in the
world of abstraction and storytelling and right. And those beliefs, they are the reality that we
have. The first thing that you'll do at a Tony Robbins seminar is a belief busting, uh, a belief
busting exercise where you just, you attempt to do something in order to shatter the walls that
you've built around your life, whether it's, you know, accepting responsibility for these things,
or you're like walking, you know, walking across, uh, fiery coals or, you know, things when you do
one thing that you didn't believe you could do before it, it breaks everything. It breaks your
whole world of perception. And, and so there's, you know, there's that there's the, there's the
cryptocurrency grab, which is just, um, grifters and charlatans on steroids from, I watched, uh,
the other day, there was like a 10 year old kid who creates a shit coin, uh, and streams it live
and then rug pulls everybody in uh like 10 or 30 minutes or something he made like 30 000
like a 10 year old kid he's like just doing this for fun right and and people want you know they
they see something new they want to believe in it because yeah we have that false positive
predisposition but yeah so so there's that side but then there's also the theft side like that's
like i don't know if you call it legal theft but it's somewhere it's at least in a gray area
You know, I think that somebody should have every right to create a coin in their own name and put it out. If you buy it, you know, that's your fault. I'm not here to protect you. You're not here to protect me. But the other side of that is the cyber crime.
You know, we talked about how that, you know, that componentizing structure and the, you know, the propensity for computer engineers to not have a good basis in system security.
You know, it leads to problems and vulnerabilities that are amplified across the system.
They aren't kept in one spot.
So he said, so cybercrime is to exceed $10 trillion by 2025.
And $10 trillion is an interesting number because $10 trillion is what Michael Saylor has in his presentation to Microsoft for how much of the world's wealth effectively is lost through decay every year, which is about $10 trillion.
dollars. And so it's fascinating because it's enough to motivate people to seek a different
domain, to take the Sun Tzu approach and take the field of battle to somewhere where you can win.
It's like, it doesn't take long to look at this system. And Nikola Tesla did it at the end of the
19th century, somewhere around there, 1890s or early 1900s, when he theorized this form of
electric competition as the future of warfare.
Like back then we still had like cannonballs and, you know,
and we were maybe, you know, we were shooting shells and stuff too.
But we had yet to go to, you know, large scale, you know,
50 years from then, you know, we had nuclear war, but,
but you could foresee that and it doesn't take much to sit and think and go,
okay, if we are going to continue to raise the amount of power projected upon the other side
in a competition of power projection, we will eventually reach a point where there is so much
power being projected that it cannot be used because it would obliterate both sides and you
will reach this stalemate. Like that makes perfect sense. If you're paying any attention at all to
the direction that things are going where, you know, like, Hey, it wasn't that long ago that
people were using spears and then bows and swords. And now we've got, you know, then we had musket
balls and now we've got, um, now we've got shells, um, with, with primers and firing caps. It's like,
okay, this is going in a certain direction. Here's how this ends. Um, and then to be able to take
that step and step from there and go into the realm of a cyber type of competition.
Yeah.
It's so cool.
Like it's this, it's this, this way of, of using first principles to just tear literally
everything down and go, you know, what actually is this?
And so I don't, I don't use the word war anymore.
When I think about this, whenever I see war, I replace it with, you know, power projection
competition because war is so much like a sport, right?
You've got uniforms and you've got, you know, the coach that's in charge and you've got the guys that are the grunts and you've got the, you know, the special forces or whatever, you know.
But all you really have to do is put a grenade in the quarterback's hand or put an AR in the batter's hand and you've got war.
Like it's just a competition.
Who can exert more power, right?
Who can?
Right.
Right?
Like, I mean.
No.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I think you're right to redesignate war.
Lowry, that's the reason he gives us an account of what he calls primordial economics, because warfighting has this really negative connotation.
People don't want to accept the thesis if they think that Bitcoin is a form of violence or something like that.
But if Bitcoin is just an extension of primordial economics that we are subject to by virtue of being evolved and evolving beings, then we can see we're going to have to keep on scaling the cost of attack to us along with the benefit of attacking us.
That is that in Lowry's language, the prosperity margin we have, the amount of resources that we're accumulating, we have to scale the cost of attack along with our accumulation of resources or else we become a honeypot, right?
If the cost of attacking us is not right in parallel with the benefit of attacking us or doesn't exceed it, then people are going to come after us.
And I like how you emphasized and pointed out the way in which logical constraints are not sufficient to replace a physical power scaling. We can't just put, I mean, because like naively people could think computer code, like that's logic, right? It's an if-then statement. It's something that it's mechanical. It's a smart contract. There's no way to get around this.
But we see cybercrime, we see rug pulls, we see smart contracts are manipulated, people understand how the logic works better than other people, you can use them sometimes in a way to achieve some a result that other people would not have expected to receive because they're abstracting differently than you are.
And it also, as you point out, goes back to just the way that software engineers are human. We're all human. And we have limitations when we deal with things that are more complex than we are. So we're always going to need cost of attack to protect our resources. Otherwise, we have a honeypot.
We have, you know, like Coinbase as the custodian for lots of different entities, Bitcoin, as opposed to holding your keys to your own Bitcoin.
That's the difference between, you know, hoping that logical rules, logical constraints are in some sense protecting you that a third party has decided upon as best kind of best practices.
I have nothing against Coinbase. I just use that as an example because it is a software provider or a form of software or whatever that's being used to protect digital resources.
Again, it's just the difference between Bitcoin is a cyber electric dome that has its own form of real world protection included, whereas anybody else holding your Bitcoin for you is some sort of trusted third party in which you're trusting the logical constraints that they're using.
And I mean, as you elaborated on and mentioned, logical constraints are no substitute for real world, the primordial economics of real world power projection.
Yeah. So the BitPower idea is brilliant in that he, again, uses grounded theory methodology to come to the name of Bitcoin, where he's given these examples previously of how, you know, these things are just named by whatever they, whatever the person chooses to name it, especially in these abstractions.
and it doesn't necessarily relate to what that thing actually is.
Like, you know, they say like a toaster is the most perfectly named product that's ever existed, right?
It's just, it is what it does, right?
But a Bitcoin, like you said, it can very easily be BitPower.
And so BitPower, horsepower, you're expending energy.
what would it mean to be able to have this halo of bit power around your information so that I can still have my Facebook page, I can still have my Amazon account.
But if they want that information, I have to agree and they have to expend energy to get it.
And like, think about how, so the danger of this type of system, you create a tool that tool in exchange for information offers a service.
And, and by the way, your actual activity, just using it, like you don't even need to give them information, right?
Like, I would not need to give anybody information who had a properly coded algorithm.
I would not need to give them any information about me in order to come up with a nearly accurate, perfect profile of who I am.
You know, I'm sure they could figure it out real easy. Right.
But if you could still have that, except, you know, hey, you know, if you want my click history, if you want my if you want to see, you know, like say that they they they time, like how long you spend looking at something and how much it interests you.
and they use that to influence later buying decisions and stuff like that and what they're
going to show you, you know, that's, um, they're doing this, uh, because it's so valuable, like
that, that's knowledge and knowledge is literally power. And so if we were to be able to impose that
halo, that dome, that, um, projection of power around, uh, a cyber dome around our data,
But, you know, we can still have the exact same services like Facebook is not going to be evil if you do that.
Amazon is not going to be evil if you do that.
They will have to in exchange for that information, they will have to make an agreed upon exchange of power.
And and the power of those algorithms.
I listened to a podcast, and I think I told you about this, with the founder of Patreon, who had been a musician.
And he started his career traveling up and down the West Coast, playing every place that he could find, and not making any money.
And then he just started putting some songs on YouTube.
And he gained traction, and he started making a lot of money because people were subscribing to his channel.
And then what happened was the algorithm came out where instead of seeing your timeline, it used to be your timeline, right? Now it's called your feed, what they're feeding you. It used to be chronological and now it's algorithmic based.
And when that went into play, what happened was that type of interaction where you're not showing somebody what they chose to see.
You're showing them what you're choosing to show that is based upon what has gotten the most engagements at all times.
So what's the most addictive thing that you can show them?
And so what that does is that drives something in a certain direction, right?
Where we went from little posts and, you know, hey, this is my salad that I had today to seven second long TikToks that are just ultimately addictive.
And it compressed the attention span and it compressed the ability to impart ideas.
and so it took us
not only did that algorithm
destroy those
operations like this guy
on YouTube where he was making good money
from his subscribers
because when they put the algorithm in
it didn't matter who subscribed to him
if he wasn't making content that fell
into that category
so it not
only destroys that but
it pushes behavior
it moves behavior
And it really has a high cost on society.
It just puts us into a different world.
Yeah.
The vision that Lowry has here is very grand as far as the potential for Bitcoin.
If you want the most bullish thesis possible, then take Lowry at his word that Bitcoin will be a new architect.
Bitpower will be a new foundational architecture for cyberspace.
It will be the presumption for what is real in the virtual realm, a new way to build on top of it an internet that doesn't have the type of algorithmic theft or whatever you want to call it, algorithmic manipulation that you mentioned, in which people have presumptions that the cyber realm has a natural law akin to the real realm of scarcity and things like that.
I forget the other aspects he mentioned, but just the idea that essentially importing gravity into the virtual realm, binding it with natural law akin to what happens in three dimensional space, physical scarcity being one of the most important protection from spam and denial of service attacks and all these things, costliness to action, essentially.
So yeah, the vision that he has, his thesis, the most bullish thesis imaginable, maybe not without its dark sides, because if you don't want to acknowledge that human nature includes a natural propensity towards warfighting or a necessary engagement with primordial economics,
then if your idea of Bitcoin is lovey-dovey, to use a technical word or whatever, then maybe it's not as appealing.
But if you look at it with kind of the hard squint of evolutionary theory and primordial economics, then maybe it's not so far-fetched.
yeah it's um sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me
is is something that i i kept thinking about uh when i was when i was reading this right because
i mean that's what the that's what the logic is the logic is is just words and yeah um and and so
So, yeah, it's like we need to have, in order to keep a wall around our information, we need to have some sort of stick and some sort of stone that can break the bones of these attackers.
And if you think, like, the largest companies in the world are information technology companies.
And so all of that value is value that they have taken, that they, you know, their value is in the information.
Their value is not in the product.
They're, you know, the information informs the product and makes the product even more addictive for robust in engagement.
And so think about all those companies.
Um, so Amazon is, that's data that's going to go into the Bitcoin network and Facebook.
That's data that's going to go into the Bitcoin network because we will be able to encapsulate
this data as we build upon this stack, um, in order to put, um, put a cyber dome around
our, our own data.
And yeah, I had a, I had a couple of ones that I thought about it.
The Mike Tyson quote was, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
And it's like, yeah, your plan for making a business that was built upon the information that you extract from your customers, that's going to go great until you get punched in the mouth by, oh, you're actually going to have to give a fair market value for that information.
and you're going to have to convince that person to sell it to you.
And the real danger, I was thinking about this in terms of like how laws are enforced
in the real world based on the punishment.
The real danger is not that they will destroy you.
The real danger is that they will milk you dry and they will just take they will take just enough that they can remain fat but you won rise up in offense But you know if you wanted to stop things from happening then the punishment would be so great that the crime would not exist
Like if you really think that, you know, that drunk driving is the worst thing in the world, then put the death penalty on it.
Right. But the way that it's set up is that it just basically is, you know, X amount of money that goes into the system.
We're getting a speeding ticket or littering or, you know, any of these things.
It's like really what it's done is it's created all of these rent seekers who come in and perpetuate this system of extracting and slowly bloodletting the human society as a whole by just taking enough that they don't have the energy to fight.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
The relation to Shakespeare was so cool.
and comparing like computer programmers,
they write their stories using scripts
and they hand these scripts to machines
just like Shakespeare would hand his scripts to actors.
No, that's a part of the argument
is you have to accept that.
I mean, maybe you don't have to.
I want to make this point.
There's a lot of interesting argumentation
and foundation in this thesis,
but to accept that Bitcoin might be a form of software
in a novel form of power projection,
maybe you don't have to accept
all the parts of the argument.
Some of them are kind of,
they give us a sociological
or anthropological account
that fortifies it,
but maybe you're not strictly necessary.
And what you say about this,
the Shakespeare thing was interesting
because people might be reluctant
to accept that software
is a form of storytelling
because it seems so different
to write in code
than to write in the rich language
that Shakespeare wrote in.
So he gives,
Lowry does these different examples
and interesting, but again,
I don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If there's some part or element that seems,
as you're reading this, that you're like,
I don't know about that,
keep in mind always the thesis that Lowry has.
And I don't know that all of the grounded methodology,
a lot of it goes into reinforcing the structure,
but maybe not all of it is load-bearing.
And so you don't have to accept it all whole cloth.
I want to also just go back and I said that
maybe this is not the most lovey-dovey account. It's actually incredibly kumbaya because if Bitcoin
is a machine in which we are all with our enemies summing up our power and reciprocally making
ourselves and our enemies, like cooperating with our enemies in this software protocol,
soft war protocol, competing with them, but also reinforcing them and then vice versa with us.
I mean, that's a form of war fighting in their own cyberspace that is both real power projection,
but also unprecedented as a form of warfare.
And so, you know, Bitcoin as a form of warfighting,
maybe some people go,
but if you look at actually what Lowry is saying,
it's almost like on the opposite side of,
can we dare to be that optimistic that, you know,
Bitcoin could be the resolution of kinetic-based conflict
because they've scaled out of application.
And so we can now have this soft war protocol
that we can fight and cooperate at the same time,
decentralize, where in the past we would have had to centralize
to continue scaling our power.
Yeah, it's a whole lot easier to square that circle
when you're not thinking of warfare,
but you're thinking of power contests or power projects.
If you're just thinking of that, you're like,
oh, that makes a whole lot more sense.
If I say, and again, this goes back to Lowry
talking about like things that are named things that may not accurately describe like war is not
really probably the proper term it is the subset of the it's the type of power projection competition
like it's one way of power projection competition and you know you could have a arm wrestling
contest and you could have a canoe contest or whatever it's human antlers right it's software
Yeah. I had a question that I thought was interesting. So there was somebody on X who commented they were following along with chapter three. And in chapter three, he talks about property and defining property as having ownership. Like if you don't have ownership, then you don't have property.
and and so we kind of went back and forth and i think there's a case to be made that bitcoin is
not just property but it is um the only proper like say they're calls it the highest form of
property rights that's ever existed um but i think there's even a case to be made for it's the only
actual property that's ever existed everything else could have been taken from you everything
else could have been taken by weather. It could have been taken by hierarchies. It could have been
taken by fire or, or loss. Um, like it could have been taken somehow. The only way that, um, Bitcoin
can leave your possession is if you give it like, and so you completely flip the script there where,
um, where, yeah, you, and it goes, it goes back to that kind of the, the psychological Tony
Robbins type thing where it's like, you have the power, like it's all the power that exists is yours
to give all this information that, um, is so valuable as yours to give. But anyway, so that
got me thinking about the first time that I realized that I was not in control of my own
property. Um, and that was in like 2000, I don't know what year it was like 10 or 11 or something
like that where I had an iPhone and iTunes put the new U2 album on everybody's phone,
whether they wanted it or not.
And I like me, because I am so particular about my music, I have, you know, I had it
all the way I wanted to.
And there was no way to play through everything without running into a U2 song.
Like I couldn't remove it.
And I have never forgiven and I never will forgive them for enforcing you two upon me without my consent.
But so do you have a moment like that, that you realize that like, oh, there's somebody on the other side of this and they have a key that I don't?
Yeah, I don't know that I had a discreet moment.
So two things.
I would first of all back up and say I do slightly disagree with the theoretical account that maybe Saylor has that Bitcoin is the only property.
I think when you get back –
That was mine.
He says the ultimate property rights.
Maybe the ultimate, right?
Yeah, I'm saying –
I kind of agree with on Lowry's account that if you were able to project power over it such that other people within a dominant hierarchy recognize your right to it, that's the best we can get for property.
and so like the wolf snarling over the carcass it is the acknowledged owner and that's like
primordially the best form of property we can have is just you projected power and you've won
whatever power projection contest and emerged with it but as far as like it's interesting the
question you ask like as things have dematerialized we've lost they've lost that tether to physical
reality that thing chaining them to the real world they they've lost that that that scarcity
and which seems like a good thing like oh man all these spotify gives me access to all this music
and and and all this and you know how great one thing and this is not exactly an epiphany that
you had but maybe i still have this inbuilt bias to have a real material book in my hand
because just to have a thing when you hold a physical thing you are holding the keys to that
thing that thing is the key to itself right i mean you have to defend that or whatever if someone
tries to steal it but there's a way also in which just holding a physical object is projecting enough
power over it that it's yours and having an object in physical space on your person you've
you know, use the proof of realness protocol, you're touching it, it's real, you've exerted
enough power over it, nobody else is within your body bubble. And for me, like that most viscerally
translates into having a physical library of real books, like, knowledge is such a precious thing.
Everything on Kindle could disappear, everything on Kindle could be surreptitiously, people could
go in and remove inconvenient facts from books, books can be rewritten. But once you have an old
edition of a book then even if they new editions rewrite you know the blockchated book or whatever
the rewrite the truth that that book was and erase out inconvenient historical facts the physical
artifact is the record of the thing itself and so i'll always have a bias for for books in that way
yeah and they will be to me the salarian real property is is the book that contains
an account, um, relevant, like oftentimes printed, you know, before a certain craziness happened that
wanted to change history. So the, the ultimate form of property then would be a book on Bitcoin.
Absolutely. So I'm, I want to try to bring you back to my side on this because,
okay, so you're sitting there, you've got your book or the wolf is there and they're guarding,
they're guarding the meal. However, in both instances, really what is occurring is that you
have a temporary claim, but someone else with a greater amount of power just has a delayed claim.
Like at any time, if they want to enact that power, then that property becomes theirs. That
book becomes theirs that um that food in front of the wolf becomes theirs it's just a it's a very
tenuous um and and uh and uh fleeting type of ownership where it only exists so long as somebody
else doesn't exert power and that's such an important well the the difference but the difference
is the difference is in Bitcoin, whenever that power is that delayed power, when that
delayed power comes into the system, it strengthens my property rights.
It doesn't take my, it strengthens my property rights.
If they compete on a software protocol with you.
Yeah.
Because someone can torch you out of your keys.
Someone could kill you and deprive you of your property by making you inorganic.
Well, they can, they can only kill you after they got your keys.
they can kill you before you get your keys.
I mean,
if you don't know nothing,
if you got to bury you with your Bitcoin,
Lucas,
if you've got it,
if you've got it in your head,
like if you've got,
if you've got your passphrase in your head,
then that's what I'm saying.
It's the ultimate form of property because it can't be taken.
It can only be given away.
Um,
where if it can be taken,
then it's not,
can it be taken?
This goes back to the hole in the fence theory.
If it can be taken,
it will be taken.
It's just,
it's just a matter of time.
I don't know.
I think it's a,
I'm not trying to dog the significance of your book.
Bitcoin is only significant in that it's future potential more books for me.
So I got to get the priorities straight.
Knowledge takes precedence over BitPower.
It's doing a really good job of producing books.
That's for sure.
It definitely is.
Yeah, there's a whole mill there.
But I would just say that qualification on property that it can be taken from us is an
important reminder to keep present that we always have to defend our property.
And so don't self-domesticate and think that something, even with Bitcoin, don't self-domesticate to the point where you think it's going to defend itself.
You have to have presence of mind to not broadcast on social media that you have a certain amount of Bitcoin.
You have to take all sorts of precautions in the real world.
And that's an important qualification of property that you have to be a wolf.
You have to be ready at all times to die for what you truly believe is yours, I guess.
And I think that that's a good thing.
we're all wolves here.
I'm a wolf in my books.
Nice.
I'm a,
yeah,
I don't know.
I'm a sloth.
One other thing I want to,
I think we should mention,
one other thing I think we should mention is,
because it's an interesting aspect we didn't even touch on,
is the critique of proof of stake.
Oh,
yes,
please.
This is like,
yeah,
I hate proof of stake so much.
Well,
and I don't,
I mean,
I'm not looking deeply into it,
but this embodies any intuition I had without looking deeply into it,
where essentially,
like,
I want to pull up this,
how he says this because it's good.
I mean, essentially it comes down to
proof of stake.
He really says that proof of
stake is proof of imaginary power.
It's proof of rank.
It's the embodiment of an abstract power hierarchy.
It's plutocratic
by designating purportedly
say or voting rights or whatever it does to certain groups by the amount that the protocol
purports to say they have at stake but which is ultimately maybe unverifiable because
there's an ethereum foundation again i have nothing against eth and i don't know
much about the protocol i've seen some crazy you know those like what is the always sunny in
philadelphia where that the crazy characters got that conspiracy theory backboard like all those
papers on the wall and he's like gesturing was that meme like i saw a ride the roadmap of eve
kind of looked like that to me it's like i could it just gave me a headache to think that like
they're going to execute this perfectly verge and the splurge and the purge and the yeah but again
i got nothing against the power to them but it's a good critique lowry has i think a good critique
of proof of stake at least if people want to maintain that it's the same as proof of work
It's not that. It's not the same. It's proof of, as he says, rank within an abstract power hierarchy that's been designated by the Ethereum Foundation as having certain logical constraints or something like that.
Yeah, it doesn't work.
One of them is a pasture with a hole, like one of them is inherently prone to being corrupted.
And if and that's just the rule that we have to remember here is that if something can happen, it will happen.
It's a matter of time. And so that threat.
And by the way, the more people that believe in that, the more people that join that community and add value to that network, the faster it accelerates that attack.
Because then it becomes the benefit to cost ratio for doing it.
The honeypot grows.
Yeah, it just keeps going up and up and up.
So, yeah, he makes a great argument when he's talking about that.
You and I had actually put down the exact same quote about the digital age God kings because I sat and I stared at that picture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos looking like pharaohs.
I just stared at that for like 15, 20 minutes just thinking about, like, have we ever had a time in history where you could take three faces of people and they weren't gods or they weren't kings or presidents and know them instantly because of the power that they hold in this world?
You know, there's just been such this asymmetric explosion of reward for the information technology sector.
And we have to, again, keep in mind that the information technology sector is a proxy for the value of our information.
It's coming from us.
It's being taken.
And currently it's being taken most of the times without your consent or with your consent after, you know, they have a forced opt in.
Like you can't use the product unless you don't unless you agree to their terms and conditions.
And those are 7,500-page long terms of conditions where they spell out everything.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And I would just note that on that God King picture, that's replicated in the section on proof of stake.
It has Vitalik's visage as a pharaoh and two other people who I guess are part of the Ethereum Foundation.
I don't know enough about it.
And again, I just want to say I got no critique of ETH.
I would like to read a book on like Ethereum versus Bitcoin and have them really lay out and fight on, you know, really proof of it used to be proof of it.
Right. Right. And that's all this is, is like, there's not a critique of Ethereum, except except insofar as Ethereum is proof of stake.
And so it just like I just thought it replicates that God King God King critique by having the same picture for like Vitalik as it did for Bezos and Musk.
But I don't know. There's more interesting in this chapter that we haven't touched on. Some of it's not really, I don't think, benefits talking about. It's kind of like historical stuff, like the progression of proof of work from Adam Back to Hal Finney to Nakamoto, like how it developed and things.
like really interesting historical accounts that you can see in this thesis or in other places.
But I mean, not really, like I don't have a disagreement or a comment upon that.
I think we hit the major points that are kind of of intellectual interest beyond historical record.
Yeah, I think we covered it pretty well.
I think this was a really important chapter because it does introduce, really get us to start thinking.
We've been thinking about the past. We've been thinking about the past of biology. We've been thinking about the past of human society. And this actually gets us to the forward looking mechanism where we can we can look into the future.
I think Adam Back should have statues everywhere.
I mean, the invention of proof of work is incredible.
It is truly, I think, going to be looked back upon as the most influential and beneficial thing to happen to human society in hundreds of years.
if not
I think that
I just think
if Bitcoin is something that can literally
benefit every person on earth
because every person on earth
suffers from the same problems when it
comes to trusting their bits of data
so if it's
something like
I think there is a case to be made that proof of work
is the most consequential discovery
in the history of man
I don't think that that's taking
it too far. Although fire was probably a really good one because it got us to the point where we
could create Bitcoin. Yeah. But as far as the historical progression though, like getting,
finding an answer to the double spend Byzantine general problem, like it's just progression.
It's not just back doesn't get a statue. It's a, as a lot of innovations are a progression of
brilliant individuals who innovated, added to, and had the courage to create and put out.
Yeah. I wonder, I got to thinking about this when I was reading it because Lowry's in the military, which is a abstract power-based hierarchy. And I was thinking like, I just, it's so interesting to think about this.
you know, we talked about this, uh, online, I think was like this modern day Billy Mitchell,
who is, um, trying to scream up to the top in an organization that has an abstract power-based
hierarchy that says, um, rules come from the top down and communication comes from the top down.
Um, so yeah, really interesting. I mean, it's gotta be a very brave thing to do. I think,
where there's career reputation
that would have to be taken into account.
But I suppose if you're going to stake your career on anything
and you understand Bitcoin,
then that'd probably be the place to put it.
That'd be the chance, the time to take that risk.
So yeah, I loved the chapter.
I thought it was really cool.
I thought your introduction and your summary is awesome.
So I think people are really going to benefit from that because you did a great job covering everything from the beginning to the end.
So, yeah, one thing I would be interesting on people chiming in on specifically, I gave it short shrift and I would I'm curious to hear more is Bitcoin as a planetary computer.
How serious that metaphor is, what it actually means.
And and yeah, so that's something I would like other people to help me understand more of is Bitcoin as a planetary computer.
basically it's like the first computer it's a a weaving machine and developed in france in like
a like a hundred hundred some years ago um and it was so it's a loom and it's got all the spools
of thread and it has these cards that have holes in it and they are fed into the machine and the
nature of the pattern on the holes determines the nature of the, um, the color of the thread
that you see, um, that's, that's slung back there by the block. And I watched this thing. I watched
a YouTube video of it and it's, it's literally a computer. Like it is 100, like it's just punch
cards. And you think about the first computers that had punch cards that you put, it is 100%
a computer. And then to think that we went from that to what we have today and in a hundred years
is mind boggling. And so anybody who has doubts that we will be having conflict in cyberspace,
like take a look at the trend of technology and where it's going. And it has become
asymptotic where it is reaching this, you know,
which if we talk about the singularity,
the basically it's like the point where we can no longer figure out what's
going to happen because everything is going to be so cyberspacey.
Like that point I think is just going to happen so much faster than people
think. And we've reached that. So yeah,
if we're going to be globally tied to cyberspace, just,
I guess give credence to the idea that cyberspace will be the place where we hold our competitions
and our battles and it's where we hold our value because our value is what we're going to project
power to protect those resources. So yeah, but no, the Jacquard machine is, it was just the
coolest thing. That's been my funnest thing that I enjoyed learning most was watching that video
and just seeing that old, like it's just making a rug.
But yeah.
Yeah.
No, fascinating chapter.
Thanks for the conversation.
Fascinating conversation, Lucas.
I'm looking forward to chapter six.
And so, yeah, let's wrap it up.
Let's look forward to next time because this is,
it's all culminating in the real world consequences of all this.
And that's chapter six.
And there we go.
All right.
I guess I will say for those of you that are watching,
it's on X, it's on YouTube
and it's on Spotify
we may, if we get demand
put it on Apple but nobody's asked yet
if you would
please subscribe on YouTube
or Spotify or follow Grant
or I on
X, Grant is at
the whole frame, I'm at Lucas Maddy
and we really
enjoy and we're really thankful for
the amount of attention
that this topic has gotten because
it's been a way for us to have
really good in-depth conversations that we both wanted to have, but it gives us skin in the game
knowing that there is an audience to it. So it gives us a reason to really up our game and do
better. So doing better for us, doing better for you. We thank you. Thank everybody. And Grant,
yeah, awesome. I'm just loving your summaries, man. Killer conversation.
Yeah, definitely great conversation, Lucas. Appreciate it.
All righty. See you guys.
Later.