All right, so Lucas and I are here today.
We are on the final chapter of Softwar, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin.
It has been an intellectual odyssey.
I hope you've joined us.
We went through the previous five chapters, and it's all cumulative to, of course, the recommendations and conclusions that we get today.
We'll do a little summary here, and then we're going to go through the recommendations and conclusions.
rather the recommendations one by one and parse them out.
So the core argument of this thesis, I've kind of stated it this way in the past,
is something like Bitcoin represents a soft, as in non-kinetic, non-lethal form of warfare
that could be used to counteract the dysfunctions of abstract power hierarchies
emerging in digital age society.
So that's an important thing.
The abstract power-based hierarchies, these can be nation states,
software-based corporations like Google or Facebook. And the nature of an abstract power
hierarchy, or the nature of abstract power, rather, is that it is imaginary. It's based on
the designation of rank or authority within a belief system, like politicians, judges, priests,
software admins. They determine by designation, they're designated the authority to determine who
gets access to resources or rights within the system. The admin is the one who kind of divvies
out access to the digital resources within a piece of software. And a judge does it perhaps
within democratic society adjudicating rival claims. In the past, so the nature of an abstract
power-based hierarchy was that the power was imaginary. It was an imaginary form of power.
alongside that we also have of course physical power we have armies um we have wars we have
revolutions we have the actual exercise of kinetic or lethal physical power that's projected so
this to do a quick run through up to chapter five then that was kind of a statement of the
core thesis and what an abstract power-based hierarchy is and what physical power is um this
This whole endeavor begins in chapter two, we went through the methodology as a grounded theory analysis, which is a way of doing a qualitative form of analysis. So it's not just quantitative, kind of technically parsing what Bitcoin is, but it's qualitative. It's looking at what the implications might be.
In grounded theory methodology, you don't begin with hypothesis. Instead, you set out with a sort of general idea that you're going to create a theoretical framework from which later hypotheses can be deducted and then analyzed.
So the grounded theory methodology, and we saw this as we explored the book, it requires a sort of like indiscriminate, broad-based investigation, a sort of courage to really go outside of one's kind of professional domain and explore and refine your explorations as you move along, hoping that everything is going to coalesce into a final theory.
That theory for Lowry's work here is power projection theory. So chapters three, four and five are developments of power projection theory, first in nature, then in human society, then within cyberspace, within human society.
So in chapter three, power projection tactics in nature. I mean, we learned that power projection is used by animals as a way to delineate claims to resources, power literally in watts, the ability to, in the real world, exercise power.
So in order to control resources, you have to kind of beat off the rival claimants, ward them off. And so that requires a form of physical power projection. We got an evolutionary account that led up to pack animals evolving where cooperation was a form of physical power projection they used in order to compete with other animals.
Wolves travel in packs because that's more powerful when they're getting resources from other animals in the environment.
But it also leads to this issue where you then have to divide resources, intraspecies, intrapack.
You have to have a dominance hierarchy in order to determine who is going to, within the wolf pack, get certain resources.
Within nature, these dominance hierarchies, intraspecies, intrapack, are based on power projection.
There are kind of the wolves will scrabble, they'll snarl at each other, but they'll usually stop short of killing.
They dominate and then they back away.
We saw with deer, they actually develop an apparatus for physical power projection in a non-injurious form in the form of antlers so that they can have these jousting competitions in a way that's not so prone to injury.
yet still again they're projecting physical power to determine amongst them who was going to get
feeding and breeding rights which led to the systemic benefit of the pack because it would
tend to in the long term lead to a more fit pack from there we moved on to chapter four power
projection tactics in human society as a continuum again um evolutionarily from we are just animals
and so the evolutionary story is where we depart as well we also though as humans developed the
capacity for abstract thought, a way to be better hunters.
We actually became the apex predator because we developed a theory of mind and could imagine
what other species were thinking or how they might act.
And so we could then better kind of develop our hunting strategies to take down the bison
as we cooperated in a group with other humans.
We then, we're pack animals too, humans are.
we began to cooperate and we scaled up our cooperation beyond what most animals can really
do because our power for abstract thought allowed us to develop belief systems people could then
you didn't have to formally know somebody or know their name or have them be family in order to
know that you can trust them in a certain sense as as part of a cooperative endeavor instead you
You can just say, that person's part of my tribe.
That person's part of my clan.
That person's part of my religion.
You could have a belief system where you all could subscribe to.
That belief system could scale up cooperation.
And we get the flowering of these bigger and bigger human cooperative packs.
These belief systems were interesting because they were abstract.
And they gave rise to a new form of power, of abstract power to settle intraspecies dominance hierarchies to establish a pecking order to determine who would get the rights within the tribe, clan or group.
These belief systems, again, I mentioned earlier, we would designate a chief, a politician, a judge, a priest, maybe a shaman really early on in order to tell a story about who got what and for what reason.
The issue with this, and this gets us to an important aspect of the theory, is that abstract power hierarchies come with kind of some built-in dysfunctions.
I mentioned earlier that power, that hierarchy, dominance hierarchies based on physical power projection led to these systemic benefits of selecting for the strongest, the most intelligent, allocating breeding and feeding rights to them.
And so long term, you get a more agile, adroit and more lethal pack, lethal, at least more evolutionarily fit.
With an abstract power hierarchy, you're no longer meritocratically selecting for the projection of power.
Instead, again, it's a belief system that is kind of abstractly determining who gets these feeding and breeding rights.
And so people then tend to become self-domesticated.
We are averse to physical confrontation. We have a theory of mind. We don't want to see our brothers and sisters suffer. And so if there's an abstract belief system that's kind of giving us a class, a role, a story about what our rights are, we tend to accept those and self-domesticate rather than stand up for ourselves in a sense and fight for more rights.
So abstract power hierarchies, I mentioned they come with these kind of inbuilt dysfunctions of kind of a weakness towards external predation. They're not meritocratic. So the whole group can become weaker and become subject to invasion from the outside.
Also, there can emerge a ruling class that exploits and abuses this kind of predatory systemic predators over the group itself, the people at the top of the hierarchy, leads to oppression, which can lead to an uprising revolution from within.
So in these two ways, both the invasion from without that kind of devours a weak abstract power hierarchy or the revolution from within that, again, arises to resist the oppression based purely on imaginary power of a ruling class.
Both of these are projections of physical power that is remedying the dysfunction of an abstract power hierarchy.
abstract power hierarchies though even though we have physical power kind of fine-tuning them
they don't disappear in fact they continue to scale up our cooperation um and we get into you
know from clans to cities to city states to nation states what what physical power does do though is
over time at least has the tendency to move from for example monarchy to democracy these um
revolutions, these periodic revolutions
to remove oppressive abstract power
hierarchies, again, can remedy
the dysfunction a bit because they can at least discipline
these continually
scaling abstract power hierarchies
because they have to, the rules
have to maintain a bit of fear
of those that they rule over because they know
the story of history of how many
kings were eaten by the people that they were
predatory over. So that
leaves us at chapter five, power projection tactics
in cyberspace.
Basically,
Abstract power-based hierarchies are based on a belief system that is created, a story that is told that people then subscribe to and kind of opt in to believe and agree to their role within it.
Software then in the digital age is a digital form of a belief system.
It's a set of encoded permissions like a rule of law that determines rank, who gets what digital resource for those who kind of opt in to the software who download it.
Such as, you know, if you join something like Facebook or Google, you're at the mercy of that belief system.
You both operate according to its rules within it.
And also you can your account can be shuttered if you don't follow the rules.
Essentially, admin is the admin of the software is a sort of Theronic God King.
Like in the past, they have absolute control.
And not only that, but we know that they collect our personal data, which then in kind of very insidious and extensive ways,
that can be used to surveil, influence, control, or cancel a person.
This is all abstract power.
Again, this is not physical power that these hierarchies,
these abstract power-based software hierarchies are using on people,
the surveillance, the control, the canceling of a person,
the deleting of their account.
This is all imaginary power for those that opt into the software.
in the in the past physical power would have been used to kind of curtail these excesses if a piece
of software becomes too oppressive and begins to delete the accounts of people that aren't towing a
certain line um but how do you project physical power against a piece of software how do you
use what in the past has been the literal projection of physical force a war an invasion
a violent revolution. How do you do that against software? We have degenerating and increasingly
oppressive abstract power-based hierarchies in the digital age, in cyberspace, but seemingly no
way to discipline them through the use of physical power. They're becoming transnational,
becoming bigger than nation states. It also seems like we do have ways to use physical power,
of course, but these ways aren't usable directly in cyberspace. And when you use them, the forms
of kinetic warfare that we have are quickly scaling out of practical use. We've arrived at
the point where we now have strategic nuclear arms that, again, it's mutually assured destruction
if someone pulls the trigger on using them. So we've arrived at these kinetic ceilings where
The use of physical real world force over land, sea or air seems kind of existentially risky.
So how do we do this again in cyberspace?
How do we project physical power so as to curtail oppressive abstract power hierarchies, arrive Bitcoin or more specifically the proof of work aspect of the Bitcoin protocol?
This is a piece of technology that makes information bits physically costly.
It initiates a competition for admin rights through the expenditure of real-world physical power.
Everyone can participate in the protocol in a zero-trust, permissionless, egalitarian manner.
There's no god-king that sits over it.
In fact, according to Lowry, is maybe a new form of warfare he calls softwar, a play on software.
software being the ability through the proof of work protocol to project physical power
non-kinetically into cyberspace in a way that's infinitely scalable unlike the nuclear stalemate
we can continue adding hash rate continue feeding energy into the proof of work aspect of the
protocol it's also weirdly cooperative in that both our enemies and our friends were all using
the same protocol. So this, again, is kind of the overarching thesis is that soft war may be a novel
form of warfare that we can use physical power in cyberspace, and it may have, through the proof
of work protocol, kind of other emergent benefits for society. This brings us to chapter six,
which we're going to talk about in detail today. Chapter six kind of has three parts. There's
The first part's the key takeaways.
Some of the key takeaways.
There's so many takeaways, of course, from such a thoroughly grounded and deep book.
But the key takeaways in Lowry's estimation, followed by a set of explicit recommendations, and then concluding the whole chapter with kind of closing thoughts.
So we'll go through – first, I'll just do a quick summary of the key takeaways, and then the closing thoughts.
They're kind of similar.
And then Lucas and I will hash out the different recommendations and go through each one individually.
So the key takeaways, as I read this chapter, Lowry's statement of what the key takeaways were, is that first, Bitcoin is a physical security network that is named after its first widely adopted use case.
So this is a point he emphasizes throughout the book. We call it Bitcoin, but that's kind of just because Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous author of the white paper, the person who launched the protocol, of course, he described it as a, he named it Bitcoin, described these units as coins, and kind of therefore we come upon it now as Bitcoin with seemingly a purpose already built into the metaphor we use to describe it as a monetary protocol.
And so Lowry wants us to kind of see it with new eyes, get past this blinding metaphor.
And one of the ways he really does this is to kind of point out that proof of work precedes Bitcoin.
There's a cybersecurity – proof of work as a cybersecurity piece of technology has a history that goes back to 1993, goes further back than Bitcoin as a monetary protocol.
Another insight is, as Lowry says, he says that the goal of the thesis was to highlight the 21st century vulnerability to centrally controlled computer networks and centrally controlled software.
As we talked about, these are abstract power-based hierarchies.
And these types of – and historically for humans, abstract power-based hierarchies have broken down and been the subject of war and revolution.
so Lowry is saying that we really need a way to defend against these in the digital realm
and we can do that then through perhaps converting a globally distributed power grid
into a planetary scale computer that uses proof of work to allow power projection into cyberspace
he also talks about another key insight from his thesis is that war and revolution
They do have emergent benefits. We all see the terror and the horror of war, the cost and blood, the fratricide. But Lowry really wants to reorient us to, hey, we can't ignore that historically war and revolution have had benefits.
they have curtailed oppressive abstract power hierarchies and prevented their expansion and
control over all of the centralizing of power over too many resources. So war has at least
tended to decentralize power and make it less oppressive. Another really interesting point he
mentions here is that historically physical confrontation really, if you kind of look at
history, when we've had physical confrontation, that was preceded by an abstract power-based
hierarchy that became too abusive or oppressive. So when there are these oppressive hierarchies,
physical confrontation tends to reemerge in the form of a new war. And so Bitcoin too,
we should see the emergence of that in its historical contingency as a form of physical
resistance against, at the time, an abstract power-based hierarchy. Bitcoin is already a
revolution. It's already a form of resistance, even though we've been calling it money. Whatever it was,
was the response to what was already an exploitative financial system and a predatory
abstract-based power hierarchy in the digital realm. Another key insight for Lowry is that
So Bitcoin is reverse optimized, which is just to say usually computers and computer programming is done so that information bits become less and less costly.
Computer chips get smaller and smaller, quicker and quicker.
And each individual bite becomes less energy intensive.
Each individual bit.
Bitcoin is the opposite way.
The proof of work protocol is all about making it more costly to operate, making each of the bits more costly.
This is a good response, by the way, to someone who makes an environmental argument against Bitcoin.
One of those responses could be that the fact that Bitcoin is energy intensive is a feature, not a bug.
It's like antlers.
Again, antlers might seem to be kind of pointless or ornamental, a use of energy that's not needed.
It might seem to be better if a deer just had a single horn out of its head to ward off predators.
But we know that there are complex emergent benefits to having this branching structure on its head because it can do these jousting competitions, intraspecies in a way that reduces harm to those that participate in the jousting protocol.
Another complex emergent benefit of making cyberspace more costly, a key insight from Lowry, is that it makes cyberspace more real, more scarce and decentralized.
the changing nature another another insight is that the changing nature of technology
means that the forms of power projection are going to change we have developed the development of
computers and code um and of course when you look at human history you have vast expanses where of
course there wasn't writing and so there was just you know spoken language and warfare then we got
to a shorter period where written writing is developed. And there's still, even though that
enables abstract power-based hierarchies to scale and spread quicker, there's still
more available to discipline and break and decentralize them. Now we have computers in
code in even shorter amount of time, abstract power-based hierarchies can scale even quicker.
And yet seemingly we don't have the way to discipline and decentralize these transnational
communities that are creating policies written in computer language. And so given that, what now,
how to project power in the information age, to quote Lowry on a key insight, he says,
the key insight of power projection theory can be summarized in two sentences. Technology like
Bitcoin could represent the discovery of an unprecedented power projection tactic,
which gives people a new way to establish their dominance hierarchies and physically secure the
properties and policies they value. This technology has the potential to disrupt human
polities, a polity being like a society and its physical form of governance. This technology has
the potential to disrupt human polities at their very foundation by changing the way our species
manages one of its most precious resources, information itself, and all of the knowledge
and abstract power derived from it.
So this destabilization of disruption of human polities,
we might call a strangler pattern.
This is another insight from Lowry.
So the strangler pattern, the strangler fig tree,
is a type of plant that grows around an existing tree
and eventually kind of kills it and replaces the tree altogether.
It's a sort of progressive envelopment
where it's not all at once.
And it's actually also a concept in computer science
where it's a software design strategy
where you kind of gradually replace a legacy system
with a new one and kind of migrate services over piecemeal
instead of doing it all at once.
That's the strangler pattern.
You're strangling slowly by leeching functionality
into a new system.
So the thought is that Bitcoin could be that for the internet.
its disruption of a human polity could be that it becomes a new backbone or architecture for the
internet that operates as a strangler vine leaches functionality from the internet from cyberspace
migrating services first the financial service migrates perhaps then after that things like free
speech um and you know anything else that can be valuable information which perhaps could be
anything. Which leads us to a final insight, again, that I think really shows the breadth of
the thesis, but also the stark implications of what Bitcoin is. The final insight is this is
about reorganizing not just cyberspace, but society itself. So to quote Lowry,
this technology isn't just disruptive to monetary systems, it's disruptive to how our species
answers the existentially important question of managing its resources.
Proof-of-work technologies like Bitcoin could change the dynamics of 10,000 years worth of
physical power competitions, consequently disrupting how societies organize themselves
and shifting the global balance of power.
And so just to zoom in on that line, disrupting how societies organize themselves,
Lowry says later, quote, with the global adoption of cyberspace combined with the global adoption
of an electro-cyber form of physical power competition enabled by proof-of-work technologies
like Bitcoin, humanity could be at the dawn of creating a completely new type of polity
that it has never seen before, a new or adjusted type of governance system which enables the
formation of an organized society that resembles something on par with, or perhaps even superior to,
a traditional government. With the emergence of cyberspace and a new way to project power in,
from, and through cyberspace, humanity could be crossing the event horizon of a highly impactful
discovery akin to the discovery of agriculture. These technologies could reshape our understanding
of what the term national defense means by changing what national means, because this
technology could change how abstract power hierarchies are formed in the first place.
I just want to highlight how remarkable that is. The idea that it could change what national defense is because it's changing the whole idea of what it means to be a nation. The nation used to be what secured for us all of our property rights. But what does it mean when a decentralized, zero-trust, permissionless protocol that anybody can subscribe to is what begins to secure those property rights, not the nation state?
So the next parts of recommendations, I'll skip over that and then we'll circle back.
The closing thoughts is that, Lowry's closing thoughts is that first, Bitcoin is about balance of power, not about money.
That should be obvious again from the strangler pattern where it becomes this new architecture and disrupts society.
it's taking it's about taking control over precious resource bits and out of the hands
of people with imaginary power which can be both nation states and also god king software
administrators of transnational communities based in software another closing thought and this is
good if one ever becomes skeptical of certain aspects of this theory is that humans are apex
predators. And so if you think we can have an abstract power-based hierarchy, you're both
ignoring the extensive, without any sort of way to discipline or control it through power,
you're ignoring the extensive history of the kind of revolution against these types of hierarchies,
and also just the evolutionary fact that we are apex predators that we will continue to exploit belief systems unless some people physically constrain those who would abuse those systems Programmers creating belief systems regarding some of our most precious resources right now are consolidating power leading to classes of kind of a technocratic god king whose abstract power is derived from the software we use
Again, these are apex predators.
People are not to blame.
They're simply going to do this.
And so to be real, we need to acknowledge that and acknowledge that physical power needs to be projected. And again, in the cyberspace, Bitcoin seems to be the way that this might happen. He briefly touches on the game theory, very briefly, of this stating that what are you going to do with Bitcoin then? You can't ignore it. You can't stop other people from using it. So third option, you embrace it or you suffer what others do and you don't.
And he concludes with his kind of the metaphor that summarizes a key aspect of his view is that which that Bitcoin is antlers.
It's a way to settle dominance hierarchies over our valuable resources using a globally adoptable.
It's available to everybody around the world.
Non-lethal because non-kinetic physical power projection technology that reaches into the virtual.
It's not just a technological breakthrough, he says, but an evolutionary breakthrough.
That's another good quote, so I want to read it here. This is towards the conclusion of the conclusion.
Quote, if we could figure out a way to set up our dominance hierarchies over our valuable resources using a globally adoptable, non-lethal physical power projection technology, that would not just represent a technological breakthrough that could change the nature of warfighting.
that would be an evolutionary breakthrough breakthrough it would represent the evolution
of a technology that would literally empower humans to establish interest species dominance
hierarchies and determine the right balance of power dynamics using non-lethal electric physical
power rather than kinetic physical power all while still retaining the complex emergent benefits of
physical power-based resource control structures. And so he has a quote from Robert Breedlove that
I think embodies this really well. The quote is, innovation is non-biological evolution.
Evolution is biological innovation. They're the same process, just different substrates.
So in the digital age, in cyberspace, perhaps our evolution continues with the innovation that is
Bitcoin as a new form of evolution in the substrate that is cyberspace.
That's a summary of the first and the third part of the last chapter, the key insights
and the closing thoughts.
So before we jump into the recommendations portion, that's a lot, Lucas.
I mean, he definitely doesn't shy away from grand conclusions.
What did you take from that?
Well, first off, happy opening day of deer season, by the way.
Get yourself some antlers.
Very fitting that we're having this conversation today.
So let me give my quick summary.
So we've got this guy whose job is to determine how the next war is going to be fought with the knowledge that no war is ever fought the same as the one before it.
Kind of the coolest job ever.
but also kind of terrifying because you're literally trying to think of, you know, you've watched this progression.
Or sorry, let me not comment on that and then just move on because I'll get there.
So he's got this job and he's supposed to figure out how the next war is fought.
And then he goes, well, in order to figure this out, because we've not been very successful at predicting how the next war would be fought, because we have not been very successful at recognizing the technology that already existed and being able to assign it as a weapon instead of whatever purpose it was being used for upon invention.
You know, the airplane being a fun example, black powder being a fun example. They treated people with indigestion with black powder and didn't use it for a couple hundred years as a power projection source.
So he says, instead of trying to just ask the question, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this grounded theory methodology and I'm going to basically zoom out and squint a little bit.
And I'm going to start literally, you know, in true, fully comprehensive fashion, I'm going to start literally with single-celled organisms.
And I'm then going to walk forward through time.
And I'm going to see if there are patterns that emerge.
And it turns out that the pattern emerges that all organisms, plants, animals, amoebas, single cell, all organisms do the same thing.
They project power in an active or a passive fashion that secures their resources and the access to them.
And they do so with increasing amounts of power until a stalemate is met.
And when a stalemate is met, in nature, you have balance.
You have the natural order of things.
So once you get out of nature and you get into humans, then you've got this capability for imagination.
And with this ability for long-term thought and planning, then we have the ability to then move past the stalemate by innovating a new type of power projection.
Like a deer, if it were to do the same thing that humans did is it would have antlers and then it would go back to the shop and it would come back with AKs strapped to antlers.
And then it would murder everything except one would get away and that one would go to the shop and it would come back with, you know, flamethrowers and missiles and heat seeking stuff strapped to its antlers.
And it would just accelerate.
That is what humans have done, is that we did the same sort of power projection that is seen in nature.
And then when it got to the point that we developed consciousness and long-term planning, we took it to a new level where we started to break out of the natural order of things and enter into this increasing arms race of being able to project more power.
And each time there's a stalemate, I think this is a really important comment or thought.
Each time there's a stalemate, you have peace.
And that's really interesting to me.
And the reason that's interesting to me is that that reveals that war is not fought over ideologies.
War is fought over resources.
Because if the ideology was the thing, you would just, so if the ideology was the thing, then if you got the new technology first, you would obliterate everybody that you could with it and keep doing it and never stop without regard for the resources.
but when you enter into the stalemate what we see is peace and so that to me says that
really what is happening is that we are fighting over resources at the top level but then
sold a story in order to in order to sell the belief of why because we have to have the enemy
we have to you know and that's what propaganda has always been which is you're you're trying to
make the opposition subhuman in the way that they appear so that you can hate them, so that you can
fight them. But the decisions being made at the top, the people sending people to die, they're
fighting over resources, but they're fighting over resources in order to use the power of the
resources to strengthen their abstract power-based hierarchy. And this was a really interesting
revelation, I think, which was that in the race for Bitcoin, it can happen very, very fast.
And speed is a trait of dictatorships and kings and monarchs. If you have only one person at the
top with a lot of power, they have the benefit of being able to move very quickly.
And that benefit is also a drawback because they can also oppress very quickly.
But so the United States is, in terms of its decision-making apparatus, is really behind
the eight ball because we were designed to be slow in acting so that we would be slow in making
mistakes, which is arguably a really good method. You know, if I think if you only try not to screw
things up, then that is usually a good way to preserve something. So as long as you're starting
with something good and you just say, this is good, we're not going to mess it up, and
you design your system that way, I think that makes sense.
So you can't really fault it.
But anyways, we're definitely behind the eight ball.
The difference here is that in adopting this new technology, I likened it to the race for
the nuclear bomb.
Both sides knew that they had to get to the same destination.
Both sides were putting resources towards getting to the new destination.
The one that got it first used it immediately, and then it's never been used since.
And the reason being was that during the piece that came right after, you created this stalemate again.
And so you're not, you're not in getting, you've, you've got somewhat type of piece.
Of course, then we have the development of proxy wars and stuff.
But anyways, the, the point to be made is that there is at the base level to the, to
the people who are sold the story that they go to war, that is selling ideology.
That's propaganda at the top level where the decisions are made.
It is a battle over resources.
But it's a battle over resources to enforce that specific type of power hierarchy.
And therefore, I think that is where I really understand how adamant and urgent and loud Jason is trying to be on this subject because it's not going to be a stalemate.
So when both sides have bombs, they have a stalemate because they're so efficient at what they do, they're too inefficient to use.
But with Bitcoin, it's not, this was my kind of idea from chapter one or two, I can't remember, but dead money kills.
In the same way, you've got all this potential energy, all these warheads that are built up, and in order to impart power, they have to be released.
The difference with Bitcoin is that it's not dead, it's alive. So instead of reaching a natural plateau of a stalemate, if you're the last one to jump on board to Bitcoin, then you just get your ass kicked for a thousand years every second of the day for eternity.
And the only way that you can change that balance of power is to exert or is to do something that is valuable higher up the road, you know, to literally outcompete.
And this is, you know, so this is, he comments on how this rearranges society.
And the way that I have thought about how it rearranges society from a corporate standpoint, from a business standpoint, is that if you no longer have to overcome the cost of capital being a 12% loss because of inflation, then you are no longer tied to growth.
growth is just consumption so what we're doing is we're iterating on um a current process in order
to just try and get more out of it and and growth for growth's sake is not is not good it just it
increases uh it miss it misallocates capital because it is continuously trying to make a faster
horse, not invent the car. And so if we adopt this, then we'll see corporations that their goal,
instead of becoming a quarterly goal of, I need to grow 3% this quarter, it will become like
Michael Saylor's company, a thousand year goal. Don't lose the Bitcoin. This is your goal. Your
goal is to have, um, this strategic reserve of this very powerful, um, highest order of property.
The only thing that you can actually own, which means that you have to give it away. It can't be
taken from you. Um, so yeah, the, the, the premise changes from, um, instead of out compete next
week, next month, next year, it's compete against yourself to not die.
It's interesting because that falls into, you see Brian Johnson, don't die on, on X
a lot now, who's real good friends with Bology, who is a big time Bitcoin, Bitcoin dude.
So interesting thoughts in there.
Yeah.
I just think that that was, that's kind of fascinating to think about, which is that
that mutually assured destruction is proof that we fight for resources, not beliefs,
but it's resources to enforce the beliefs.
And yeah, we're in a position where if this is the case, then it's already been adopted.
It's already, we're already kind of fairly late in the game in terms of recognizing it
because the actual innovation was proof of work.
So 1993, 1996 era or whatever.
Proof of work is the black powder that was ignored
and Bitcoin is the cannon and the cannonball
that when you put that together,
then you're able to do something
that shatters the opposition, I think.
So anyways, that's where I'll leave it.
Bitcoin as a Manhattan Project is interesting because, in a sense, what has happened is the bomb has already went off.
And we are all facing away from the light, looking at our shadows, wondering what's going on, seeing our shadows get longer and longer, seeing the world change around us.
It's like proof of work was the Manhattan Project.
It was done in relative obscurity by computer scientists.
It was then a series of nuclear bombs were set off by Adam Back and Hal Finney testing it, testing it.
And then Satoshi Nakamoto successfully has the – what do you call that?
What's that one in Oppenheimer, the final test where it's a success?
There's a name for it.
Oh, yeah.
I know what you're talking about, but I don't know the name either.
I don't either.
But in any case, that was the absolute – the test of it, the realization of it.
So the bomb was already went off.
The Manhattan Project concluded in 2009.
And now it's just, can we recognize that the world has changed?
Can we recognize, I mean, Paul Revere is already late.
Like the revolution is already ongoing at this point.
It's just, will we even realize that there's already a war being fought?
I mean, if Bitcoin is bit power, the protocol is already operating.
And again, historically, if physical power is projected as the result of an abstract power-based hierarchy, then Bitcoin was already the shot across the bow. Bitcoin was already the projection of physical power.
I mean, we already had an oppressive, abstract, power-based hierarchy that we all felt, that we all feel, which is the financial system. Whether for you was the subprime mortgage crisis, whether it was Occupy Wall Street, this was percolating.
whether it is in other countries, the fact that the United States has the global reserve currency and can leverage it to export inflation abroad.
All of these things were already the abstract power-based hierarchy of fiat currency with all of its oppressive aspects.
The war then began with Bitcoin. It's already BitPower. It's already operating. The war is fighting.
Again, it's just, will the United States realize that it is already the participant in a war that's being fought?
And this is the cool part about it is, you know, you can go ahead and pick up arms in this war.
And this war can be about not just the nation state versus other nation states, but the individual against, again, the god king of software, against other nation states.
This is a neutral, permissionless protocol. We can all begin to build up the army, so to speak, and represent, at the end of the day, the ideology we hope to be the dominant one that emerges from once Bitcoin has like acid eaten through the abstract power-based hierarchy that it is operating against.
whatever reemerges from that, again, strangler pattern. Hopefully, if the good and the righteous
have got Bitcoin, then I mean, maybe there's never good and righteous. We're all apex predators. But
the thought is, you know, if we believe abstract power, it can also be a good thing, right? We all
have beliefs and we want our beliefs at the end of the day to win. And that's why Lowry is,
I mean, he's theorizing this because he's a military officer. I mean, he wants the United States to win, I suppose. And he wants the ideology, the abstract power that it represents to emerge victorious at the end of the day, rather than a communist vision, an anarcho-tyrannical vision, whatever other vision.
And so, again, I think that for me, like the last chapter really gelled that insight that, oh, my gosh, the war is already being fought. We're already participants. And so, like, if you understand that, then you are historically in quite the position as an individual.
and we shouldn't take that lightly
both, I mean, people like Lowry
who want to sound the horn to the institutions
that he respects, the military
and ourselves to our family and friends
right? Friends, I have more than one friend
so, yeah
I at least got you and I know some other people
so family and friends
Is it Trinity by the way?
I think that was the test
Did you Google it?
No, it just popped into my head
I got lucky
I got lucky.
I really like the metaphor of the Manhattan Project and being like the time between Trinity and the bomb is used is kind of like the time between the invention of proof of work and whatever it is we're waiting for, I guess, which is basically the first nation to declare a speculative attack on Bitcoin using their own currency.
Right.
That could be it.
Yeah.
So I think, and I do, so as a Bitcoiner, I don't like that term.
I don't know what I would call it otherwise.
But as a guy who looks at this technology, has more trust and belief in it being what it looks like than anything that I've ever seen.
and walking around in a world where 90 some percent of people are completely oblivious.
I do think that there may be some really strong correlations there to what the people who worked on the Manhattan Project must have felt in those months.
I think it was like two months or something.
Yeah, you saw a changed world. You saw that the world was changed immediately.
And you can't go back. And as a Bitcoiner, that's what it means, I think, to be orange-pilled, which is to pull back this veil and go, oh, the world that I thought I knew, there is no going back.
The strangler pattern is the strangler vine is already too extensively wrapped around our legacy institutions. It's just a matter of how quickly or how disruptive the migration of first financial than other sorts of digital resources is going to be.
Yeah. One thing I wanted to comment, you talked about the financial sector as having, you know, kind of arisen as the power structure within the hierarchy that we have now, basically, is where a lot of the actual power is held.
And I just, I think about how the comment that I made earlier about how companies became focused on growth and not innovation.
So if your company focused on growth, then it's just grow, grow, grow, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger, get bigger, get more leveraged.
It's basically a competition of who can have the most leverage and then apply that leverage.
And I just think about how much good to humanity was lost because due to the money that was being paid in that sector, which was due to misallocated capital from poorer signals given to the market,
But due to that effect, all of these brilliant minds of physics and mathematicians and statisticians, quantitative analysts, all of these people who could have otherwise been working on innovation, things that are beneficial to humanity.
Instead, they went to Wall Street and they developed ways to extract more and more and more and more.
They became priests in an abstract power-based hierarchy.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's just, it's such a waste.
It's such a waste to think about, because one of the things I think about Elon Musk is that for all of this thoughts that we have about him being, you know, this sort of Tesla-like figure, I think he's far more of a Rockefeller.
You know, he's an industrialist.
And for everything incredible that they're doing, like with Tesla, they're still iterating on a car.
They're still making a faster car.
just like the people before wanted a faster horse.
And I think a lot of those minds that went to Wall Street,
not only did they go to waste really for the loss that we had,
but due to the inherent evil nature of the abstract power-based hierarchy
at which they sit atop,
they themselves became, in effect, evil for the things that they were able to do,
the Cantillon effect and extracting so much value for themselves
while leaving effectively scraps for the rest of the world.
I don't know.
I think Elon is a high priest in the abstract power-based hierarchy
that is Diablo 4, and the rest of his enterprises are downstream of that.
It's all capital to it.
You've got to prioritize.
You do.
Some god king has made quite the system for you to be a part of.
so yeah i want to i want to draw uh another quick thing that that came into mind um when i was
thinking of this was that this like lines up the so the hierarchy thing is that's jordan peterson's
like uh bread and butter like that's what his books are about the acknowledgement of hierarchy
is always a revolutionary thing because people want to they want it to be invisible power always
wants hierarchy to be invisible so you accept your place within the thing that you don't
acknowledges there, but there's always a dominance hierarchy there for sure is.
Yeah. And so it's just, you know, I find it fascinating that these common themes pop up across
many different domains of interest.
Yeah And I think that for me like you know getting into software I didn realize that it was going to go so deep And I think when any work starts with and takes seriously evolutionary theory and works from that first principle you going to arrive at something that is closer to truth than most people are comfortable with
Because most of, I think, civilization is about denying that we are animals and denying that we are going to die, denying that if you want anything, you really need to go out and get it.
Denying all sorts of essential truths that go right down to project power if you want to secure for yourself what we saw we needed to secure back when we were single-celled organisms.
So just like beginning first principles again from such a deep perspective and then putting it all together and legitimately through solid argumentation arriving at Bitcoin as a continuation of that very evolutionary war that got us out of the primordial pit, man.
The soup, I guess.
Yeah, it's really cool.
Really cool.
Yeah.
Yeah. So the thing, one of the things, again, this Bitcoin, the idea that really got me on the road to Bitcoin, that was like my biggest revelation was the idea of aligned incentives.
and that's I just as I go through this it becomes more and more clear that the selfish act is the
selfless act when it comes to Bitcoin subscribing to the system subscribing to the network it gives
you power within that network and it gives the other people power within that network proportionate
And you all are protected from and attack with the same, you're all part of the same army, basically.
So everybody who subscribes to that, they benefit from it, which is not something that you've ever seen because what that looks like in the fiat world is a Ponzi scheme.
is that that's how it's sold,
is that everybody that subscribes to this, you benefit from it.
But the truth is that eventually you run out.
So the planet, yeah, oh, sorry.
I'll kick it back to you because I want to see where you're taking us now.
So let's get through the recommendations,
and then after that we'll move on to general,
our own observations and insights about the book
to the extent that they weren't already swept up
in what we've already said.
So again, the recommendations broken up
into two rough categories, containers.
The first one is recommendations for future research.
The second one is recommendations
for future policymaking efforts.
So, and there's five, five or seven,
discrete recommendations.
We'll go through them each one by one.
So the first recommendation for future research,
develop more theories about Bitcoin,
not based on financial, monetary, or economic theory.
And specifically, Lowry recommends other grounded theory approaches to create.
Again, what grounded theory does is it isn't the testing of a hypothesis.
It's the generation of a theoretical framework from which you're going to
derive hypothesis and then test those.
So he wants people to, recommendation one, develop more theories about Bitcoin
not based in financial, monetary, or economic theory to create alternative frameworks.
So, Lucas, what do you think about that, Rick?
I think if nothing else comes out of this other than an increase in the amount of research
that's done with a grounded theory methodology, it is a huge win.
Because just the idea of having a previously developed hypothesis that you test,
because you think that you're asking the right question,
turns out to be very dangerous, very inefficient,
very useless in terms of actually getting a good answer.
So, yeah, I think that's a beautiful recommendation.
I don't really know what other angles you come at it from.
You've got financial, I guess, so you've got the financial,
You've got the human kind of humanity side of it, the Alex Gladstein.
I don't know how that's quantified.
Yeah.
I'm sure it can be.
I mean, I just think you just go – you just look at – open the university calendar for your nearest university.
Look at all the disciplines there and say Bitcoin and.
Bitcoin and anthropology, biology, chemistry, all these things.
What insights – I mean, if Bitcoin seriously is going – a strangler pattern vine that is enveloping.
being the architecture of the internet and going to slowly migrate all functionality away from us
what is the cyberspace but in some sense the flowering of all human culture in the digital
realm and so like we need to orient to that fact and i think um yeah there's the possibility maybe
even if the theoretic you know the grounded theory maybe at the end of the day it's it's of
not everything is going to be of the same level of impact or insight as coming at it from a
financial or military strategical angle. But I think that each of them would have something to
add and something to say, even if to say, you know, that how Bitcoin impacts chemistry is,
you know, attenuated in whatever way. But no, I think that all of these disciplines can look at it
and all of them can maybe apportion some insight to the whole endeavor, some new theoretical
framework. Well, it's certainly, it's certainly destroying finance and economics right now.
You know, like it is certainly proving to be something that needs to be examined very deeply.
Yeah, yeah.
And not just what Saylor's doing.
Right, right.
No, I mean, so those two, the financial and monetary and economic angles are,
there's a lot of awesome people doing really good analysis and things with those orientations.
So it's just going to be interesting when we begin to see people doing things with Bitcoin from other academic or theoretical angles.
Yeah.
Saylor is rapidly proving that economics doesn't exist and that physics applies everywhere.
He's like, oh, we're just going to take a lever and we're going to spin this thing really fast and then we're going to smash more Bitcoin into a share.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Because the Bitcoin and could just become Bitcoin obliterates this field, like completely takes it out.
This was just an artifact of the fiat system.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, maybe we'll end up finding out that there's some fields of study that naturally die or are just absorbed by the approach and the tools of another field.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. No, and Sailor, the interesting thing about him, I have not listened to his, some of his, you know, we all kind of touch on some of his longer lectures, I think, and hear him go really deep into the nature of power. And Lowry also cites him a few times with the cyber hornets protecting yada yada and all these things.
And so Saylor has a really, of course, deep philosophical understanding that goes far beyond finance, monetary and economic theory. And I think that it would be interesting if he did some general Saylorian theory of reality.
recommendation to deductively analyze Bitcoin from the perspective of power projection theory.
So again, Lowry did a grounded theory analysis. He did come up with a theoretical framework. That
theoretical framework is power projection theory. So we can also begin to analyze Bitcoin from the
theory that he has generated. And so we can derive some new hypotheses from the theoretical framework
that he has generated and test those.
Some that he says have some hypothesis
that could be tested based on his power projection theory
that have been generated in the context of this thesis.
Can physical cost function protocols, proof of work,
such as in Bitcoin, represent the operating system
of a completely new type of planetary scale computer?
That's a hypothesis we could test.
If so, would it have completely new emergent properties
If so, what are the benefits of reverse-optimized planetary-scale computer that makes bits expensive?
So these are hypotheses that kind of Lowry, as he's developed his power projection theory, has deduced the REC2 then is deductively analyze Bitcoin from the perspective of power projection theory, including possibly these hypotheses.
What do you think?
I think we've got a guy who is saying, here's my research.
Go ahead and try to break it.
Do whatever you can.
Test it in every which way.
I think that's a sign of a good researcher, which is somebody that is open to being challenged on their conclusions.
So, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you said I was open last time that the idea of a planetary scale computer, a state mechanism that is the world, was eluding my comprehension in some fundamental way.
For me, a computer is a magic box that kind of shows you things when you type words into it.
I lack the computer science theoretical framework.
It's been very illuminating, and I encourage anybody else who wants to understand more about object-oriented programming, what programming even is, I think this thesis is a great place to start.
But it does arrive at this very high-level concept of a planetary-scale computer.
Did you want to make a run at the impenetrable wall that is my ignorance on this, or do you think that we leave that be and try to scoop it up later?
Because if you have thoughts on it, if you want to cure my ignorance.
Well, I don't think I have the best grip on it yet either.
But the way that I'm trying to think of it would be that the abstract power-based hierarchy is sitting at the top.
That's like the layer four.
So like when you think of Bitcoin, they talk L1, L2, L3, L4.
So it's top-down design where you basically say, we want to tell this story so that we're in charge.
And so what's the type of power that we need in order to enforce that?
And it turns out the best form of power to enforce that is a fiat monetary system, because that allows you to create unlimited power, which is merely stealing the energy and life force of your citizens from the future and bringing it into the present.
so I think it's interesting because you've got this so it's a top-down approach we're coming at
it from the perspective of we're a power-based hierarchy we want to stay in power what is the
l1 that best supports that and so you reverse engineer this thing for speed as opposed to
bottom engineer it up for security which is what bitcoin so bitcoin then you're it's your l1
and you build upon that so that as you go up the layer,
you maintain the security and you add speed and you add functionality,
but you don't start with the functionality and say,
this is how we're going to design the feeding mechanism
in order to steal resources in order to make it run.
Because it's like the comparison to airplane design,
which is that like any failure is a catastrophic failure.
Like it has to be designed to be perfect first, perfectly safe, and then we'll make it go fast.
So anyways, just the idea of Bitcoin as a planetary computer, I guess really what I was thinking was,
okay, so what does it look like if you have a perfectly secure L1?
what does the power-based hierarchy look like on top of that.
And I think that that power-based hierarchy is a dictator,
but it's a decentralized AI dictator.
And that decentralized AI dictator,
so the problem with the abstract power-based hierarchies
is that they're not immutable,
is that they change the laws, the rules,
in order to benefit them.
So that would be a way to use the immutability of Bitcoin to tie it to an AI so that it applies the beautiful L1 that we have.
What is the planet a planet?
Is the computer a planet?
Is the planet a computer if Bitcoin uses the world's infrastructure to derive power to compute hash functions,
which then solve, you know, add a block and maintain a ledger?
It seems like the actual computing is done by computers and they're merely being like fed energy.
in the same way you plug a computer in,
they, of course, take energy,
and they use that to complete the hashing functions.
But the actual, a computer is a thing that computes.
What is being computed is, I mean, what is, I guess,
there's different distinct computing functions
that are going on maybe,
but it seems like I don't understand
how the infrastructure can be a motherboard
or we can say that the world is a computer,
except for in a very metaphorical sense
where computer is beginning to take on a distinct meaning
from my understanding of the computer.
I don't know.
I don't know they're going to solve that.
Maybe the world's energy system is the power supply of the computer
and the ASICs are the processor
and the blockchain is the memory card.
I think, yeah.
And so in that sense, you can say it's a planetary computer.
it's i i yeah maybe that's if it's that sense okay that makes sense but it sounded to me like
the planet was a computer in some sense in the infrastructure is like the circuit um like the
circuit of course runs across the face of the chip and like the world is a chip a macro chip and
i just i don't fully understand that i'm not again we have a hypothesis here i want somebody
to flesh out the terms and then try to find a way to test it even if in theoretical space or
whatever so i think it's yeah i think it's because i think it's because the higher layers haven't
been developed yet so i think that when you see those higher layers get developed like smart
contracts and um ai ai dictators on there then i think it might be easier to see but who knows
i think that computer science itself is a computer science itself is a series of metaphors about what
is happening to changes of state of a mechanism.
And that Lowry's theory, of course, uses computer science as foundational, so draws from that
school of metaphors.
I just want a Bitcoin and that removes computers from the equations and describes it to me
with crowns on an Indian big red pad so that I can understand it.
Yeah.
And I want to hear a good answer on the quantum computer question.
Because if Bitcoin is a state-changing machine and then you have a computer that can exist in both states at once, how does that change the game?
I heard Michael Saylor try to answer the question one time, and I wasn't fully – I didn't understand what he said.
So who knows?
So that might actually – thoughts about quantum computing and similar might fall into the next – we've finished up recommendations for future research.
Now we're on a recommendation for future policymaking efforts.
Maybe quantum computing, considering the role that that might play, would be one of those.
But in any case, recommendation three, a recommendation for a future policymaking effort, similar to recommendation one, don't rely on financial, monetary, and or economic theorists to influence Bitcoin policy.
I think it's don't rely solely on maybe is the meaning of that.
Don't rely on financial, monetary, economic theorists to influence Bitcoin policy.
and he was really good don't listen to peter schiff is what it's
well that's his own rule here's my policy recommendation yeah right jim gramer cannot
yeah now we can just set him up and have him say the opposite of what we want like a reverse
pythia that just like predicts the opposite future of what we want and then it becomes reality
so i don't know what world that guy lives in an inverse oracle and we just have him say
the things that we don't want to come about or whatever the opposite like a dead weatherman
gets stuff right more often we can harness kramer's power if we know how to use it we have to it's
like a very greek tragedy the way we have to ask these questions of him um okay go on but you said
weatherman though this and it's yeah i said dead weatherman so let's talk about living weatherman
so weatherman are not good and a good analogy or metaphor for why we shouldn't rely on financial
good analogy for why we shouldn't rely on financial monetary economic theorists
solely to influence Bitcoin policy. We don't call in weathermen to talk about what quote unquote
cloud computing is, right? And so Lowry's thought is we're misunderstanding Bitcoin as money,
and that's causing us to call in financial monetary economic theorists in the same way that
Amazon Web Service call in like an etymologist to talk about spiders because they have a web.
It's like, no, you don't do that. I could realize that these are metaphors we're using. Bitcoin is a metaphor. So don't rely solely on financial people. So I guess, what do you think about that? Don't rely on financial monetary economic theorists to influence Bitcoin policy.
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a really solid recommendation.
Yeah.
Do you think that, or go ahead.
I was just going to say the thing about not recognizing it as a weapon or as a power projection technology because it's purported as a money.
I mean, the bonus is that if you buy the money story, then you're supporting the weapon story anyways.
So you're already doing your role.
Yeah.
But he does, and I don't know, I'm not following along exactly.
so is that I don't know if it's this point or later on, but we're domesticated and we're
not versed in computer science.
And that means that we are doubly screwed at being able to recognize this for what it
is.
And not only that, so one of the things about being a Bitcoiner is that you become more
in tune to the world around you.
You become more in tune with, you know, theories about nature.
You become more in tune with nature.
Everybody's outside getting their grunt on.
On the flip side is the abstract power-based hierarchies.
They seem to encourage, instead of being present, distracted.
And so not only are we domesticated, not only are we not versed in computer science,
it is of the power-based hierarchy's benefit to constantly distract us from being in a position where we could recognize that
because there are so many weathermen reporting on cloud servers type of thing.
Like that's what your financial services television is basically.
So yeah, I'm along with that.
I think, yeah, that's a good one.
Recommendation four, think of Bitcoin as,
this is a recommendation for a future policymaker.
Policymaker, think of Bitcoin as electro cyber security system
rather than a monetary system.
So similar to the last one, but an affirmation, a positive statement.
Think of Bitcoin as an electrocyber security system.
So basically cyberspace is the new realm of warfare.
Bitcoin is the security force of that system, of cyberspace, of that realm.
And within this recommendation to think of Bitcoin as an electrocyber security system, he mentions two, maybe three things we might want to do.
consider stockpiling Bitcoin, consider supporting a robust domestic hashing industry,
and perhaps, he says, even dedicate military resources to defending mass-based infrastructure,
the physical aspect of the Bitcoin network, internet, the physical correlate to the internet,
the power grid, computational facilities, the chip fab aspect of that. So what do you think
about that, thinking of Bitcoin as an electrocyber security system and potentially doing those things?
I think the name is so cool that nobody will ever get it. I think they want it to be really boring. Like if you're trying to sell a senator on something.
What name?
The electrocyber security system. It just sounds too cool where I don't know if it can get traction with Congress. It needs its own MAGA.
I was thinking about this.
You know, like Donald Trump doesn't win the presidency without that ugly red hat.
Like that thing became ubiquitous.
And it spread the ideology.
It spread the belief or whatever.
Soft war needs a ugly ass red MAGA hat.
It's not that ugly.
It's just like bold.
But it needs that memification in order to be grasped by someone who hears electrocyber security, whatever, and they go, you know, like that.
And again, as a result of the inherent nature of an abstract power-based hierarchy to use its power to distract its citizens, that's where we've gone as a culture is that we are not deeply thinking about things.
We are looking for the meme, which is okay if you can develop the meme.
Yeah.
No, that's – I mean that's a good recommendation. He actually – in the seven recommendations he has doesn't have consider how best to memetically infuse Bitcoin as bit power into a thing that's going to educate the public about this.
I mean, this is a recommendation for a policymaker could be consider the rhetorical angle.
How rhetorically should Bitcoin be framed and sold to the democratic populace for whom from whom support whose support you want to further these other policies?
Yeah, needs to have a meme.
He needs to have a meme competition.
I mean, there's so many good ones like software, of course, is itself software.
That's an excellent phrase.
Yeah.
The electrocyber security dome, and there's all things in here.
The antlers thing, these are all really good educational tools that Lowry has.
The problem is that the thesis itself is so, there's so many interlocking parts.
It's like how rhetorically, you say Bitcoin is warfare, and people recoil from that.
And you're like, no, no, no, Bitcoin is the software protocol, soft war protocol that makes
warfare as you know it obsolete in a certain sense.
that like antlers helping deer resolve their dominance disputes.
And then you're already the person's eyes have glazed.
So like, how do you educate the populace?
Do you just say Bitcoin is money and then just go on with your policies regardless?
Maybe that's the best way because recommendation five,
consider supporting Bitcoin under the second amendment.
Proof of work protected under the second amendment.
What do you think about that?
One thousand percent.
I absolutely see how Bitcoin as a monetary instrument, it kills fiat, which is what allows for wars to occur, or at least at the scale that we see them.
But not only does it do that, Bitcoin itself is both the battlefield and it's the weapon and it's the defense against the weapon and it's the resource over which you're competing.
So it's everything. It takes all of that stuff and it packs it into one nice little container where it's not everything is so disjointed.
like apparently I heard that Trump is selling Bitcoin to people by saying it's digital gold
and gold is energy extracted from the ground but it's not useful typically where it's extracted you
have to take it somewhere if you have to take it somewhere you have to protect the trade routes
if you have to protect the trade routes you're going to get into skirmishes
Bitcoin, you're drawing energy out of the ground and you can use it right there or you can use it wherever you are in the entire world.
So you can take energy out of the ground in Antarctica and it can be used in Buenos Aires immediately with no transportation cost, without having to inflict kinetic energy upon someone in order to protect that route, without loss of expended energy in order to just physically get it there.
How does that get us to the Second Amendment, though?
So it's the battle. It's like I said, it is everything. It's the cannon. It's the cannonball. It's the black powder. And cyberspace is the battlefield. So it is all those things.
I mean, it's all these things as a very poetic description, but of course, the Second Amendment, there's a jurisprudence associated.
There's the way that the Supreme Court has interpreted the right to bear arms.
And so, you know, it's not the right to bear a battlefield.
And so like you know as a proposal consider supporting Bitcoin under the Second Amendment I guess that has to be a proposal that we rhetorically begin to kind of we seed the thought into the consciousness that hopefully is going to arrive at judges
that Bitcoin is an arm that we have the right to bear.
And so, yeah.
So it means classifying it as a weapon.
Right. Yeah, there we go.
Yeah.
The government could.
Yeah, because you have the right to bear arms to protect your property, basically, to protect your freedom.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
The government could do it regulatorily, classified as a weapon, which would do something for the Supreme Court or some circuit judge in interpreting it as something a person might have a right to.
Well, so Bitcoin is already defined as property by the SEC, I believe, or maybe the IRS.
I can't remember.
But anyways, so it's already defined as property.
Yeah.
So now I think the only barrier that you have to hop is you're like, okay, the Second Amendment gives you the right to bear arms to protect your property.
So it requires a grounded theory of methodology because you have to go backwards.
You have to go, okay, here's the property.
How do you defend it?
Well, the property is how you defend it.
The proof of work aspect of it, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, definitely, yeah.
So that's slicing off the proof of work aspect.
You don't protect Bitcoin under the Second Amendment.
You protect the proof of work.
Proof of work, right.
Yeah, right on.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, yeah.
So that's kind of more of a refined approach even.
Yeah, cool.
Proof of work, not even Bitcoin.
Cool.
there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a few podcasts where um lowry really gets into this with
a couple podcasters about is it first amendment second amendment so there is an underlying issue
i mean like there's there is like what is the best strategy to protect the common person's
access to this thing that if you classify it as a weapon ammunition is this going to
you know jeopardize the ability of the common person to self-custody or something like that
But there's a whole debate there.
I guess I'm kind of agnostic on it, but it makes sense that it would be under the Second Amendment.
Well, Bitcoin is code.
So there's case law supporting the code being protected under free speech.
So the entire thing gets protected under free speech.
But then, yeah, maybe proof of work itself is explicitly protected under the Second Amendment.
Yeah.
I like it.
Cool.
I think you should argue for it.
There we go. I'll do it.
Recommendation six.
Go ahead.
Recommendation six.
Recognize that proof of stake is not a viable replacement for proof of work.
Yeah, and he mentions, so when he does this, I mean, obviously Ethereum is kind of what's in the mind's eye here.
Recognize proof of stake is not a viable replacement for proof of work.
He says something interesting in talking about this, that he says that Ethereum is a Sybil attack in operation.
A Sybil attack is when you use fake identities to gain a majority of a network to then exploit that network.
And he just, my reading of it is that he's saying proof of stake just is already a Sybil attack,
and that there's potentially fake identities, pseudonymous identities,
or anonymous people who control these things.
You have no way to verify who owns this stuff.
A lot of it was granted by, as I understand it,
the Ethereum Foundation granted a lot of people Ethereum when it was proof of work
and then it converts over to proof of mistake.
And we don't actually know who are the majority owners of all this.
So that's one part of it.
And he just casually mentions, too, that it's run by non-U.S. citizens.
And so that might give one a buzz.
So recognize proof of stake is not a viable replacement for proof of work.
I assume you're on board with this, Lucas.
Yeah, you know, I hate proof of work.
I think it's like—
Stake.
You hate proof of stake, I suppose.
Sorry, proof of stake.
My bad.
I love proof of work.
The civil attack.
So remember when we talked about, I was saying, like, your book is not something you own.
It's something that you have until someone takes away from you and because somebody has more power than you.
So it's not if if it can be taken away from you, then you don't own it.
You can only own something that you can only lose by giving away or by literally losing in my mind.
And so, yeah, proof of stake is utter trash.
It's, again, it's the hole in the fence of the pasture.
It is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, that something will, yeah, that what you have will be taken from you without your permission.
Right on.
Recommendation seven, this is the last of the recommendation, recommendation seven for future policymaking efforts.
Don't expect the next war to look like the last war.
um yeah um that's lowry has went through the history of what results when that happens of
thinking that they're going to come at us with this technology and not this new technology they're
not going to use cannons against us because they didn't use cannons against us in the last war and
so you make yourself um vulnerable to cannons so yeah yeah what do you think about that i don't
I think that's just the fun part of his job, which is that you get to look at all of these wars in succession and then kind of apply the same principle to nature as well and look at all of the hierarchies in nature.
But, I mean, the really cool thing is like, weapons are cool.
Like, they're fun to look at.
And so you get it like, oh, here's a cool sword.
And then here's that sword that no longer is useful because this guy has a musket ball.
and then the musket ball is no longer useful because the guy has a rifled shell
and then a machine gun and then an airplane.
Like, it's just, I think it's kind of cool.
And I love the chart that he put up where it's like the progression of the weapons.
And as they go up, they gain in power projection.
And then he's got this offshoot with the drone technology.
Yeah.
I think drone technology is fascinating because it's doing this.
It's going the opposite way.
Instead of going up in the amount of power projected, it's going down.
And the most efficient drone is going to be like a little bumblebee that stings you and kills you.
Yeah, but that's still...
So that chart is power projection techniques are becoming more and more dangerous,
more and more kinetically powerful until they go past a kinetic ceiling where they become impractical to use.
So that arc upward with strategic nuclear weapons has broken through that ceiling of practicality. It's no longer practical. And so one might think we can no longer engage in large-scale warfare with a nuclear-armed party. How about these small proxy wars, these small kinetic warfares, what's happened to Ukraine, something like that, where traditional forces do meet, even as larger powers withhold the use of their nuclear arms.
but Lowry says we're going to see a fork
away from nuclear arms
in these smaller conflicts
towards something perhaps like AI-powered drones
the point is that even these small-scale conflicts
are going to become kinetically more and more devastating
the killing machine is not going to stop
innovating and finding better ways to kill
whether that's like you said the bee sting drone
or like drones with grenades attached to them
and there's just millions of them
and they're operated by some AI
and so perfectly like some ballet in the air that with pinpoint precision can go and kill any person they set out after.
Maybe it's an engineered virus that attacks the DNA of the ethnic group you don't like.
Like any kinetic offshoot to try to go around the stalemate that nuclear arms poses is itself going to arrive at a kinetic stalemate
where it's impractical to use it because it's going to mutually assure destruction.
I got a question for you
don't expect the next war to look like the last
oftentimes science fiction is a good way for us
to imagine the future while we sit in a chair
and enjoy entertainment
what is the sci-fi movie piece of literature
whatever that helps us to understand something like
Bitcoin as a form of warfare
as a protective electro-cyber dome within cyberspace,
as a portal between the virtual and the real.
There's a few times The Matrix was mentioned by Lowry.
It's useful but not perfect.
Do you, I just don't, my realm of reference is not great.
What is the sci-fi movie or literature that's going to help us and other people,
or is it yet to be made by some enterprising artist
that is going to help us understand a software protocol?
I think it's Tron. Have you seen Tron?
Long, long time ago. What's the angle there?
So what is proof of work? Proof of work is a race. It's a race to beat everybody else to the destination.
And there's real world implications in terms of physical power.
And in Tron, if I remember right, it's like a motorcycle race or a Tron whatever thing race in cyberspace, but with real world consequences.
Like if he die there, he die.
Nice. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
And it's a race just like proof of work.
So I think that would be, I've been trying to think about this too, because so many future type technology stuff, they always have some sort of like archaic, steampunky type of thing going on where you just know looking at it, you're like, no, they're not going to use swords.
Like, no.
You know, no, they're not going to have elephants with lasers on them, you know.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think Tron does a good job.
You know, so this originates, a lot of this theorizing in Tesla's observation that human out of the loop electronic electric warfare is going to replace kinetic warfare.
So this has been human out of the loop warfare has been a thing in the consciousness for a long, long time.
I wonder, is there a sci-fi or piece?
Is there something that does already have human out of the loop warfare?
I read Ender's Game once
I don't remember all what it's about
but I think perhaps
if I recall correctly and I don't
it was about that
some enterprising person
could read that book and tell me or look at the Wikipedia
I guess
I don't know of any human out of the loop
ones that I'm sure
they exist I've never really been into
too much sci-fi I do like some
but yeah the only ones
I can think of are like
where they're fighting with robots and stuff,
but they're like inside the robots.
They're not like remote controlling them or anything.
Right, yeah, yeah.
I don't know about that one.
That's a great question.
And it's this Bitcoin and thing, like Bitcoin and pop culture.
Like right now, if someone did a survey of Bitcoin and pop culture,
they would see a very niche culture, perhaps in X, formerly Twitter,
of people doing certain Bitcoin-related art-type things.
But otherwise, it would be like,
oh, Bitcoin was mentioned casually in this movie
or something like that.
There's not yet something where Bitcoin is integral to it
within the pop culture, either musically
or in an artistic fashion, or movies or a series
where Bitcoin is the thing that is the plot element
or provides the structure of the entertainment.
I think that that is going to happen.
And it's going to be interesting to see what is the Bitcoin influenced art that emerges.
And that influence being like really integral to what the work of art means and kind of the structure of it.
Not just like, oh, we'll accept Bitcoin for the art or something like that.
Or, oh, there was Bitcoin in this movie.
No, like something where it is definitive of what that piece of art means within the context of human culture.
There's a TV show, the guy who played Freddie Mercury in the Queen movie, where he's in this very near-term future where it's like evil corporation.
Literally everything that we're seeing happen now was happening.
And Bitcoin was like the very prominent – like the central bank digital currency that the evil bank put out was like very prominent.
It played a very prominent role.
What was it?
It's called Mr. Robot.
Oh, I've heard of it, not seen it.
Yeah, that's well worth it.
That would be well worth it because it's almost like a step play-by-play.
the focus the storyline is maybe a little more focused on the psychological nature of this guy
i guess kind of but the really the core principles of like the banks are failing
the corporations are evil they're pushing central bank digital currencies bitcoin is
the way that you resist it yeah it's like yeah that that's yeah that'd be a really good one
Yeah, yeah. Right. Anything where a work of art, a story or something like that acknowledges money as a form of surveillance or control would be an antecedent to like Bitcoin as are like within the tradition of like, here's something that augured the arrival of Bitcoin. So for sure, like, that's really, yeah, that'd be cool.
And he's got movies on his, so reading through the credits or whatever, the citations, like Prometheus, the movie Any Given Sunday is in there.
Like, you know, The Great Gatsby.
Like, this is cool.
Like, he drew a lot of pop culture stuff.
And so, yeah, I think if we're going to continue to think about this idea, then looking for inspiration in art is a really good idea.
For sure. And for all the artists out there, give us that inspiration.
What can you do to – what does Bitcoin mean to you at a really deep psychological level where psychology hits emotion for you and makes you feel something?
And then how can you channel that into something that's not like a Bitcoin slob or something like that?
So I want to see that. I want to feel that. I want that to exist.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be nice in my world.
Yeah, so feeling something in my world too, man.
Just feeling anything.
That's all the recommendations.
Anything would be nice.
Bitcoin is hope one day.
So recommendation, we went through all seven of them.
That concludes chapter six as far as we summarized it, we talked about it,
we did the recommendations.
that brings us to kind of like a retrospective teary-eyed of the thesis in general.
And if you had anything, anything, I guess, that you wanted to say about it, any remaining insights, anything at all?
I think the idea is like cotton candy for the brain.
It's just so much fun.
Uh, it's just the, the, again, the reason why you and I decided to have this conversation was because we both started reading this and we were like, this is fascinating.
Like, this is really cool.
Um, it's a fun thing to think about and have a discussion on.
Um, I really enjoyed, uh, I don't know, like favorite takeaways.
it's funny I think my favorite takeaway is not something that actually had to do with research
it was just this idea of the grounded theory methodology like that truly is a better way to
answer questions and so I really am going to be viewing things so much differently and I guess I
would assume that grounded theory methodology is just like another way of saying first principles
thinking, but, um, it, it's just, you, you're like, look, it's, it's like watching someone
who's a professional wire up something after you've struggled to try and like put the stuff
in the right spot.
Like it, it's like, Oh, okay.
Maybe there's like more to this than just here to there.
Maybe there's a whole lot in between that we should consider.
So yeah, what about you?
Whenever somebody can, you have an object in your hand and you're staring at it and you're like, I've exhausted my experience of this object.
I perfectly understand everything this object has to offer.
And then that person picks it up and rotates it in your hand.
And you're like, there's a whole new angle on this thing.
I know nothing.
It's like, yeah.
So all objects like recede from our ultimate understanding.
And so anybody that can take and unpack a new aspect of any phenomena.
And again, yeah, like that's what was an entry point for us.
I mean, like our whole project is like, what are the great books of Bitcoin?
Because Bitcoin is a much bigger phenomena than merely like trading or something like that.
It's going to transform in a strangler vine pattern many aspects of our lives.
And so what is the canon of literature that's going to help us understand this in all of its fullness, which is going to include and does include financial and monetary and economic thinkers, but it also includes other things.
And that's what is fascinating about this is unapologetically looking at something called Bitcoin from a non-coin related angle of military theory.
And so that's liberating.
I hope it's liberating for anybody listening, reading or whatever that you too can think about Bitcoin from whatever perspective you bring in your own life, like in your profession, anything like that.
And it's going to add something.
And not only can you bring your own perspective, but you can open yourself up to the fact that other people are trying to bring their perspectives and share them. And we can read, we can think about these ideas, and it's really going to enrich our understanding of this phenomena that, again, if it is what I think many of us think it is, it really is going to have some sort of transformatory impact on many aspects of our lives beyond merely
as a savings technology or whatever. Yeah. I think my favorite part of our discussions today
was when you brought up the comparison to the timeframe of people who were living and had the
knowledge of the Manhattan Project after Trinity before the world knew about it. And I think that
that is such a wonderful way to put what most people who are at this level and even not even
not even near this level but just like believers in bitcoin i think are walking around in that the
you know that same mode where it's like the world is about to be changed and no one knows it and i
know it and i can't do anything about it and so you know you just i guess do what you can but
Yeah. I made the comment, by the way, earlier about how I think it's such a tragedy that all of these brilliant minds that were like physics, engineers, statisticians, mathematicians, that their talents went to waste and were used to abuse the used to abuse society through the faults of the power hierarchy in the financial services industry.
I also think about, you know, so those physicists would have become physicists, not financial analysts.
And the mathematicians would have been mathematicians, not quants.
And they would have done real good for the world.
And I think I thought about another parallel, which was that so in order to enforce that power-based hierarchy, you have to have a legal system that is just massive.
um and so then you get a lot of brilliant minds that are going into law um uh because there's
in in some places opportunity for a lot of money there and i and in the same way i think about like
what would the physicists have done if they hadn't gone to wall street i think about what would the
lawyers have done if they hadn't gone to dc and i think a lot of them would have become philosophers
And I think we may be entering an era where that's one of the things is that maybe what you and I are doing is just a natural outcropping of this.
Yeah.
Where, you know, like you're a lawyer who is now effectively a philosopher right now.
So, you know, I mean, you always have been.
I see that at this point.
Yeah.
You always have been, but it's more of an expression of your true nature, I think.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Perhaps.
So I wonder how that applies to like brilliant minds that were misallocated to other fields as well and like what they would be doing, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Yep.
There's going to be vast disruption and everybody in their own life.
I mean, if as Lowry says, like the term national defense is now going to change because national is going to change.
I mean, we all define ourselves in relation to our membership in the nation state, in relation to how state power interacts with our daily lives.
Like these are aspects, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, that I think constitutive of our identity.
Certainly, as you point out, constitutive or contributory or determinative of how we use our time to what we dedicate, what vocations we dedicate our lives.
What are the vocations to which one can dedicate themselves? When the nature of the polity, the nation state changes, is disrupted by a technology that decentralizes key aspects of what the government used to do.
I mean, it's like the new Doge office in the form of a protocol. It's eating things away. I mean,
just in a sort of natural way. What does that mean for each of us individually? As you mentioned,
maybe it shifts a lot of people into more productive endeavors or fulfilling. I think
that's a really good way to put it. Like, what does it mean to be human? And maybe Bitcoin allows
us to ask ourselves that on a much more frequent basis because that's the project if you don't have
to worry about how am i going to save my value how am i going to protect myself from the wolves
and the abstract power-based hierarchy the people above me exploiting me what do i got to do to
protect myself and the ones i love if you can free up a lot of that time maybe you can rededicate it
to exploring your humanity through whatever project is much more fulfilling.
I think we're seeing that authenticity is the most marketable skill,
the ability to be authentic and to genuinely try to connect
because what we're seeing is the realization of Kevin Kelly's Thousand True Fans
where anybody who is genuinely doing something out of love
and putting work into it and trying to answer the question of what is my purpose
by answering it with to have a purpose
and to have a purpose that I can dedicate myself to.
Yeah.
I mean, just because you're seeing like this creator economy is utterly exploding.
And so, yeah, I think that's where it comes down is that you just have people who realize that they do have a calling.
Like it's whether you call it spiritual or just sort of a recognition that you are meant to do something extraordinary in the way that it's extraordinary for the type of purpose and fulfillment that you'll have from it.
I think that's I think that's where it moves us.
I think that's the direction it takes us because we're able to, you know, carry wealth further into the future without having to continuously, you know, fight, fight growth, basically.
Yeah. Yeah. As Saylor says, you spend 40,000 hours working.
Why not spend 100 hours figuring out how to preserve the value that you make from that work?
And what happens when you do put in those hours and the technology arrives that allows you to save those?
Maybe that 40,000 ticks way down and these projects of authenticity, even unmarketable authenticity, maybe those become much more forefront in people's minds.
So, yeah, I hope so.
But that's – I don't know.
That's what I have to say, I think, about software for the time being.
What do you think?
Software needs a MAGA hat.
There we go.
Yeah.
How about that?
Yeah. And that's it. Yep. I'm good. I'm good. You guys, thanks for, thanks for giving us reason
to continue doing these. It's been a lot of fun and excited to see where it goes next.
You can follow Grant on X at the whole frame. You can follow me at Lucas Maddy. Podcast will
be up on YouTube and Spotify and X. So cool. Thanks, man. Awesome. Calm up for