All right. Yes, we're good to go. So today we're going to talk about the first chapter of Jason
Lowry's software thesis. So we don't have the book here. We're just reading a PDF that's floating
around the internet. I don't know. There's a hard, there's like a hardcover book or softcover.
I don't know if that's the exact text of the thesis, but I assume if not, it tracks very
closely. And the actual book is going for like thousands of dollars on Amazon. So we're not
going to actually have the book we just have the pdf here um and so we're going to do the first
chapter which the first chapter it begins with executive summary and the first chapter is
essentially that as well it's like a summary of the thesis of what software is um why he's doing
what like what is the background that led him to this why he thinks this is important that type of
thing it kind of lays out the progression of the rest of the thesis which is like 400 pages pdf
and 40 pages in the first chapter here.
So we could just start with the executive summary
and then move on to the first chapter.
The executive summary is like a page,
and then the first chapter is basically the executive summary reset.
And he has kind of, throughout the thesis,
illustrations to illustrate what illustrations do,
kind of what he's talking about.
And so the most maybe canonical illustration
is there's these different domains of warfare.
There's different thoroughfares that militaries are used to control.
Land, sea, air, recently space.
And there's another one, cyberspace.
So softwar, basically, this book is going to be about controlling how do you project physical power into cyberspace.
Land, sea, air, and space.
These are obviously realms where you can have kinetic warfare.
You can move mass and use that mass to secure physical property.
Basically, that's what a military does, and as Jason Lowery is going to describe it here.
So this book is about how Bitcoin, but more loosely speaking, or more specifically speaking, proof of work can be used to secure cyberspace.
That is what soft war as opposed to hard war is going to be.
so that's kind of i think the executive summary to just generally lay out that we can have this
operation this theater of warfare this thoroughfare we're trying to control which is cyberspace and
we have a way to operate and do war within that realm which is soft war and that's going to be
done by the aspect of bitcoin that is proof of work which is going to allow kind of physical
power projection in cyberspace as a really general executive summary does that sound right to you
lucas that's what this is about yeah i think again to restate you've got the progression of
the domains of warfare um land air or sorry land land sea airspace cyberspace um you've got the
kind of the novel, um, novel engagement, the novel power projection, uh, tactic of what a
cyberspace, um, cyberspace domain would look like for engagement of, uh, power competition,
which would be the utilization of proof of work, um, which I'm sure we'll get more into, but,
effectively using power instead of logic, which is a novel approach and appears over the last 16 years to be working or 15 years to be working.
So, yeah, I think other than that, and then I guess, you know, finally, the kind of the point of the thesis, I guess, his recommendation.
would be that the United States needs to immediately adopt Bitcoin as a power projection tactic
to as a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which incidentally, there's a bill that just went
into the Senate now sponsored by Cynthia Lummis that does just that, which would be the purchase
of a million Bitcoin over the next four or five years.
Right.
So we can advocate that specific adoption of a strategic reserve or barring that adoption
by the people of Bitcoin.
And so we have land.
That's the military.
That's the army.
We have the sea.
That's the Navy.
We have the air.
That's the air force.
You have the space.
That's a space force.
We have cyberspace.
And that's going to be Bitcoin, going to be proof of work protocol.
But also in the picture, I just wanted to mention, there's actually the picture of the
ASIC application specific integrated circuit that is used to mine the Bitcoin.
So there is like a physical infrastructure and there would need to be a concomitant maybe
like, I mean, maybe that's the, that is the strategic national reserve is the, that's
the analog to the military or I'm sorry, to the army or to the Navy or to the air force.
Like in cyberspace, the strategic national reserve is the analog arm of the military.
I don't know.
Do you think there's more that's going to be advocated there or is logical to – should there be a cyber force?
Or maybe there is a cyber force.
I don't know.
That would make sense.
Yeah, I'm sure there is.
But, yeah, that would be the logical next step would be the cyber army.
I think maybe the way I would think about the miners, the ASICs, would be kind of the delivery mechanism of the power projection technology.
So you've got the bullet and the delivery mechanism is the gun or actually the power projection technology would be the gunpowder and the delivery mechanism would be the bullet.
So that's, I think, probably how maybe I would think about that.
And I do think that that is that would probably be such a vital thing.
We talk about Bitcoin.
Everybody talks about Bitcoin.
Kind of like everybody talks about Bitcoin.
Nobody talks about mining.
But I think what what the recommendation here would be that that's probably the most overlooked thing.
And that would be the most important thing would be not just to own it, but to actively compete in order to own more of it.
Yeah.
In this, you know, in this power projection.
Right.
Global competition.
Chapter one, I think, starts, it validates that in the way that it starts.
It starts with a section called inspiration and begins with a quote from or the observation from Einstein, the theory or whatever, that mass is energy.
And so if mass is used by the Air Force, the Navy, the Army as a way to project power and secure control of some sort of property to protect our nation, to protect a nation, energy, if energy is equivalent to mass, then energy perhaps can be a substitute for the use of mass as a way to project power.
In cyberspace, that makes a lot of sense. And as you were saying, the ASIC to secure the Bitcoin network through the proof of work protocol, proof of work aspect of Bitcoin does use energy for that specific purpose.
And so mass is energy. Energy then is a way to project power in the same way that mass is energy in the cyberspace realm through the proof of work protocol.
That is the way that perhaps power can be projected and property rights can be secured as a sort of surrogate to the type of kinetic or violent warfare that we usually have.
That's kind of how I think this gets off.
Yeah, this is so far, this is probably the favorite thing that I've read regarding Bitcoin in the last four years is the first couple paragraphs of this because talks about.
So like this is this is not necessarily a novel concept from Jason Lowry. Tesla hypothesized that Tesla hypothesized that society would develop such destructive kinetic power that they would eventually start using human out of the loop energy delivery competitions, which if you maybe step back and squint your eyes a little bit, that's I don't even know if you have to squint your eyes.
That's kind of exactly what Bitcoin mining is.
And then the other thing, which is by far my favorite, because you expect something like that out of Tesla, you know, brilliant, brilliant theorist that he was and doer and and everything.
You kind of expect that out of him.
But then the thing that really struck me and I kind of went down this rabbit hole a bit was Henry Ford.
Henry Ford at the same basically the same time 20 years later was trying to create a currency based on electricity that could not be centralized.
um claiming that the problem like gold was the root of all wars because um due to some of the
faults of gold as a currency um basically that it's it's so heavy and you can't really move it
around easily and that it needs to be guarded and so it's a bearer instrument obviously if you hold
it it's yours um it's hard to verify like all of those things um due to all of those shortcomings
the natural tendency for gold is that it is hoarded and that it is centralized.
And by doing that, you end up with competitions that when you hoard something that is what's called dead money.
So it's just, it's potential energy.
It's, you know, it's a representation of the energy that it took in order to mine that gold.
But it's not actually the energy. And the, you know, Bitcoin is actually a live energy competition that is continuously proving the ability to deliver power on behalf of the competitors.
And I went and looked this up. I found the newspaper article that this was quoting where he talks about it. Henry Ford bought a unfinished dam and he was planning on finishing it at a cost of $30 million in order to create this electric currency that could not be centralized.
That would be and he's very, very keen to say that it could not be centralized.
And I think that hinges really, again, on one of the things that is root to Bitcoin, which is that it's decentralized.
And just one one final last thing is that there is the quote from Tesla in here where he's talking about this.
But my favorite quote about Tesla is if you want to understand the world, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
And I'm not quite sure how vibration fits in, but energy and frequency, you know, Bitcoin is this energy competition and frequency is the types of things that we have used for money.
They are merely, you know, everything, everything that is matter is merely the same root molecules, I guess, vibrating at different frequencies.
And so they all stand to represent some sort of energy.
Yeah.
It's very, very prescient.
And I think interesting to think about that.
No, definitely.
And you're right, Lowry does mention those two specific kind of proto thinkers.
People have this kind of prototype thinking on energy as a way to get around mass-based
or kinetic or violent warfare.
So, I mean, that's an important part that's going to go into, like kinetic or mass-based
warfare is that violent warfare where we go out and kill our brothers we draw blood we have tanks
we shoot things at each other and it results in death and dying and um copious amounts of violence
whereas electronic warfare as the quote from tesla as you mentioned luke is like that one
it's about like how can we have human out of the loop warfare where we can replace mass-based
warfare with kind of energy delivery competitions and then as you mentioned uh henry ford also
mentioned a different aspect of electronic, of an electronic type of obviation of warfare
would be that if our money was electronic in the sense that, as Bitcoin is, but in a
way that it was not manipulable by a central bank or anybody else, then you wouldn't, that
wouldn't lead to war.
So that's kind of the inspiration as Lowry has it in the first part.
But then he kind of goes on to talk about justifying why he's writing a thesis and why does he need to ring the bell as he's kind of like a Paul Revere type character.
Why does he need to go out and tell people that Bitcoin is not just money?
It's also a type of defense system.
And he has some historical examples of why soft warfighting technology, that is the replacement of mass or kinetic warfare with electronic non-kinetic warfare, might not be recognized at first as a valid substitute for warfare or a valid type of warfighting technology.
And he has these historical examples of the most striking one is the invention of like the Chinese alchemist, the ninth century invent gunpowder and they deem it medicine.
And so for a while, they're stuck with that notion of gunpowder as medicine without making the leap that it could also be used as a warfighting technology.
and he has these other historic examples of failing to acknowledge that some sort of advance
was going to be necessary for fighting war and i think what emerges from that is not just that oh
you know boo boo we didn't notice that but that you you know when you don't notice that you lose
the nation loses and they're conquered and you also not just you know there's a failure to notice
sometimes. There's also like this hubris of we're not going to fight wars that way. And we're going
to just not like the last war wasn't fought that way. So the next one will not be. And the nation
that adopts that attitude towards potentially emerging technologies, perhaps like Bitcoin or
proof of work is also going to simply be defeated. Yeah. So two things I want to talk about there.
So first is the like it wasn just a matter of a couple couple weeks or a couple months right that black powder was not recognized for its capacity to produce power and deliver it as a power projection technology It was like literally centuries And so these things can go unnoticed by the best minds who are merely not able to see the
thing that's in front of their own face.
But one of the things I want to go back to, which I think is the most fascinating thought
that I've had the last couple of days about this, which is the idea of dead money versus live money.
So if you think about the types of money that we've had in the past, which is, you know,
the cows and the salt and the tobacco and the gold and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They're all representations. They're all proxies. They're all stand-ins for energy. So gold is a
valuable, not just because it's gold, but because of the energy that it takes to get that. I could
go get that gold on my own, but it would take X amount of energy. The salt is valuable because it
allows you to save the energy that you would otherwise be spending replacing the meat that
would rot without the salt. And so these are types of money that must be effectively kind of like
consumed in order to be used or in order to realize their potential. And therefore, again, their
natural tendency is to be hoarded and stored and kept. And what's unique about the proof of work
system is that it's live. It's a nonstop, constant, never ending competition of energy.
And so if you think about over the course of human civilization, if you want to chart the
quality of the average human life and the, you know, the way that we've progressed and been able
to protect ourselves from certain things and have certain luxuries, etc., is that you can
basically chart that step for step with an increase in the amount of energy consumed per
capita. And since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, you can also think of the amount of
energy consumed as the amount of energy captured, where we live in a world of potential energy,
and we're only able to capture and bottle and then direct a certain amount of it.
And not only that, I think the capture part is the most specifically important part for
Lowry's thesis. The capture is, how do we defend that money once we have the money?
um like so bitcoin overlaps with money it's only incidentally money on lowry's framework it's not
that like energy necessarily is money there's always probably going to be a value to it because
it's valuable for us to defend ourselves but bitcoin has this ability to prevent its own
capture the cow the gold those things require defense by separate kinetic arms we have to have
the army the the you have to have the army the navy all these things to defend our property
Bitcoin, the proof of work aspect of that is a self-defense, is a defensive aspect of it. And
that's really what Lowry's thesis expands upon is that this not just isn't money, but it's something
that defends itself and it is a defense mechanism. And so I think that anti-capture aspect of Bitcoin
is like absolutely key for at least Lowry's thesis here. Yeah. Just to finish that thought too,
which is that if we are going to be engaging in a continual nonstop competition of who can deliver
the most energy, which also is going to be a competition of who can capture the most energy
or extract the most potential energy. And we know that human quality of life increases step by step
with the amount of energy that we are as a society able to capture,
then what we have is this aligned incentives.
And that to me has always been probably the most joyful philosophical thought about Bitcoin,
which is that it creates aligned incentives for people to move in the same common direction.
So anyone who engages in this global power projection tactic in this continual competition,
is going to find themselves seeking and sourcing additional power, power that will be accretive to human society and that will raise the level of the world around us.
And so I think where he looks, you know, we're looking backward, kind of thinking about this and talking about, you know, what these things are when they're not recognized immediately.
But yeah, the looking forward of, you know, what potentially can this lead to?
What I think it leads to is a global aligned incentive for nation states to do better by their citizens.
And the last thing I wanted to say is just to to add a little put a little put a little dressing on what you had mentioned, which is the thing where we always seem to overlook what things are when they come out.
And here's just a couple of quotes.
1993, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, quoted the Internet.
We are not interested in it.
That turned out to not be very accurate.
The co-founder of Warner Brothers in 1933 on hearing that talking movies were coming out said, who the hell wants to hear actors talk? Western Union in an internal memo in 1876 said that the telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
and it has inherently no value to us.
Thomas Edison said that fooling around with alternating current,
which is the type of electricity we all use, is a waste of time.
No one will use it ever.
I mean, it's just what I'm, you know, there's just a litany of these
where every single new technology is always misunderstood
by the experts in that domain.
And I think that's what he's really, Lowry's really trying to scream at the top of his lungs, saying, because you are in the position that you are as an expert of such and such domain, you are the most likely probably to not recognize this thing.
Not only that, but like in the domain of warfighting, that's actually a very kind of even more blind spot for many people.
And he gives four specific reasons why emerging warfighting technologies are overlooked even more than other types of emerging technologies.
One is the lack of general knowledge about the profession of warfighting.
Like not every one of us is a soldier.
Not every one of us is consumed day to day with how to defend the country.
That's one.
Two, analytical bias.
That's the idea, again, going back, that once we have a technology, gunpowder, we call it medicine, and then it becomes lodged conceptually in our mind as medicine.
So we have that analytical bias.
That's two.
Three, pacifism.
That's kind of – we all know what that is.
People just have moral, ethical, ideological objections to warfare, which impedes a lot of us from really thinking deeply about introducing something new as helping us fight wars because we kind of have this pacifist tendency.
and then cognitive dissonance that we just like it's tough for us to admit we're wrong sometimes
we have we build this huge military based on kinetic warfare and all of a sudden they're
telling us we have to fight a new type of war software so there's like the lack of general
knowledge about war fighting pacifism analytical bias and cognitive dissonance and of those he also
kind of generally talks about a camp or the the pacifist and lack of knowledge as being a result
of our self-domestication, which is a really interesting idea he's going to expand upon
later in the book.
So it bears mentioning that we are animals.
A domesticated animal is an animal that has not had to fight for its life and so loses
the ability to fight for its life and to recognize that fighting is necessary at all times to
preserve its right to preserve its access to resources.
So comfort and complacency lead us to forget the importance of projecting power.
And so what he's going to do in this thesis, again, he's talking about justifying the thesis is raise awareness and education and then talk about proof of work as enabling users to keep cyber resources secure and as a way that is able to do this by harnessing energy instead of relying on logical encoded constraints and opposing instead physical costs.
and from there in the next section he goes into actually kind of the the background which this is
a super interesting part of this because what software represents there's so many and i mean
larry says it specifically there's so many like avenues of looking at bitcoin from the monetary
the financial the economic perspective he's looking at it from the aspect of military theory
and he starts off with klausowitz to give the reader who's probably uninitiated in modern
military theory, a kind of a primer on what military theory consists of.
And in Clausewitz's estimation, he says that it has three characteristics, that war is composed
of blind natural forces and is primordial.
We have been fighting wars since we were animals, and animals fight wars as well.
It's that basic.
And two, it involves chance and probability and requires creative spirits, requires continual
creative endeavor to fight it.
And three, that it is an instrument of national policy to resolve political disputes. That's kind of what we most naively think it is. But it's also something we share with the animals. And it's also this creative endeavor that involves chance and probability. So that's kind of the really basic military theory background that's going to underlie this.
Yeah, I think pacifism is something to think about because it's probably, at least by me, it was very misunderstood or kind of glazed over.
But the idea that battle or war is just not something that you would ever consider, I think is inherently false.
it's just that we have not been able or not only sorry not only do i think that it's inherently
false i think that um you know these competitions if you look at what war is as he defines it which
is you know a projection of power and a competition to see who can do that best
it is the most fair, the most meritocratic. It is the least, it really is in the end,
probably the least messy. And if you look at the history of war fighting,
we have continually made it less and less messy where, you know, it began with two guys just
beating each other to death with rocks and sticks. And that's a pretty brutal thing. And now,
you know, I know that this, it's like a very morbid thing to consider. But the way that people
typically are, die in wars today is actually more humane than they did 500 years ago,
a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. And if we are able to move power projection
competitions to a cyber domain, then I think what we will have realized is that pacifism is
inherently a poor framework to consider how to distribute resources and how to resolve conflict,
I guess resolve conflict is probably it. But also it will be that we've kind of reached the apex of what warfighting is in the most humane manner.
Yeah, no, and pacifism is not only, it's even, pacifism is unethical in Lowry's estimation, because it blinds us to the things we need in order to actually preserve ourselves, our access to resources. So he's definitely hard on that. And it's very interesting, like, he focuses a lot on the benefits of warfighting.
and you mentioned
Lucas this
and a bit earlier
that like focusing on
the like once you go down
the route of proof of work
in Bitcoin
it kind of leads
to further innovation
but I think this is the part
that stuck out to me a bit
is that he talks about
there's kind of two ways
to preserve peace
one is the rule of law
and the other is war
and we tend
and good liberal citizens
that we are
in a democracy
to think that the rule of law
is king
But the rule of law is preserved because we fought for it. And not only that, but the rule of law has issues. It's inegalitarian. There's a ruling class over the ruled. It's trust-based. It requires people to trust that the law is going to be executed correctly.
it's vulnerable to systemic abuse because people can manipulate the law and you can write your law
into the code essentially if you have control it's also susceptible to invasion from the outside
people who are not going to accept your rule of law whereas on the other hand war is egalitarian
the king and the peasant are both equally subject to violence it's zero trust you don't have to have
any trust for a tank to work in crushing the enemy or crushing the other side and securing access to
resources and it's neutral it doesn't really care about your belief system a rule of law can be
co-opted by a viral wave of marxist thought or something like that whereas war you know we're all
equal before it and it's not going to be co-opted it's a competition of power projected physical
energy uh or kinetic energy like the kinetic or the non-kinetic the energy mass or energy
so he focuses on you know we want us to acknowledge that that wars do have benefits because
proof of work is going to be kind of a perpetual electronic warfare i think and so we want to see
the benefit of having wars in that they can like reset corrupt rule of law systems wars are
meritocratic they don't depend on what you believe or don't believe it's egalitarian everyone has
access to it. It's decisive and easy to audit the victor who knows who has access to the resources.
It has proven efficacy. We have nation states today because they were carved out through
violent conflict And we have distributed property in people possession now because war has done that and so has actually provided a sort of protocol to prove the ownership and access to resources in addition to accelerating technology
Yeah. So the main thing we go back to again is proof of work and how it changes the playing field for competition from logic to power.
And you can say a lot about power in the way that you could use it could be not ethical, but power itself is not subject to any sort of ethical dilemma or it is not subject to being corrupted.
Um, but when you think about logic, so again, you want to look at, um, the court system,
obviously like there's ways to, um, you have laws, uh, what, whatever the saying, I think
you've, you've said it before.
Um, or I can't remember for, for my friends, everything for my enemies, the, the law or
something like that.
But logic is easily corrupted. Logic is what software is in almost every instance other than Bitcoin. And that software is continuously being corrupted by actors that are seeking to find the security holes and the ways that they can corrupt it through that way.
And societies are continuously corrupted by people who look into that society and they have a different outcome in mind that is not cohesive with what the group dynamic would be.
And you can go into a group and making a series of plays, you can disrupt that society, which is, you know, it's faulty logic that you would assume that people in a society all want the society to get along.
And they want it to do better and they want it to do well, but you can very easily have actors within a group that choose to, you know, just watch the world burn. And that's not something that's possible within a power competition. So yeah, he does a fantastic job of framing that and talking about what the innovation is there.
Yeah, yeah. Those logically encoded constraints. I mean, we see the failure of those literally in our software whenever you get a virus, right? Like the logic is there, but people know what the rules are, and they find inferences or results of those rules that they can manipulate.
Crafty lawyers do that with the actual computer code of our society and lead to kind of perverse results that were not intended.
We see that the powerful have access to better lawyers, and we see at the end of the day that lobbyists create different laws.
And so the code is subject to systemic abuse in a way that physical power is not.
You might say, well, the strong man has more strength than the weak man, but they at least still are operating on the same playing field.
And the actual like substratum of what they're using to compete power is itself neutral. One cannot manipulate their way out of that. So he's going to move on to there. Like, he's talking about power specifically, of course, in cyberspace, more specifically, as securing through proof of work, our information systems.
And so the difference between the cyberspace warfare and the warfare on land, sea, and space is that it's massless, right? It's soft war. And that's where his kind of metaphor comes in. It's dematerialized war. It's massless, immaterial, disembodied.
And yet there still is a way that we can have a war.
We can have a power competition.
And that's a good thing, again, remember, because he's talking about the benefits of warfare.
So we have hard war, which is the war with mass, material, bodied.
And we also have soft war, massless, immaterial, disembodied.
They're both power competitions.
One uses mass, the other uses energy.
and you're going to have soft war fighting
which is going to, he says,
satisfy all of the Klauswitzian
criteria
and it's going to also bring the benefits
that hard war brings. It's going to be
egalitarian, it's going to
serve to
not be subject to
those systemic abuses
and it's going to
help establish
dominance hierarchy over limited resources
so soft war is going to be analogous
a hard war and it's going to bring along the benefits that again, he is saying war does bring.
Yeah. I, while you were talking, I remember a quote that I heard that it's like money is not
the best way of measuring a man's character, but it happens to be the best one that we have.
If, if you're thinking about money as a way that society values a person for the value that they
create. And if money is energy, then you could re simply restate that and just say, you know,
energy is not the best way of, um, having these competitions, but it is the best one that we have.
So, um, you know, uh, it's not, it's not subject or it's, it's still subject to everyone's
ideological fantasies that, um, you know, woulda, coulda, shoulda in a world, in the world that I
design, you know, everything would be different and it would be better and blah, blah, blah.
But in this world, um, we play the cards that were dealt and, and it turns out to be that,
yeah, like this is like, this is a great way. Like it's the most fair, like in the end,
what do you want? Do you want fairness? Like that's, that's what it is. It's the most fair.
It's the, um, it's the least disruptive. Yeah. At the end of the day, it doesn't care what you
want it's that fair right yeah but it's like it's not the world that we designed it's not the world
that anyone designed the world that evolution made through a process of continual war fighting
such that you know power projection techniques were developed by animals to establish dominance
hierarchies and survival of the fittest that's where we came about and that's what we're still
doing he goes into this in depth later in the book and it's incredibly interesting um because
I mean, and it's also Klaus with his first criteria of war, that war is this primordial endeavor that ties it like that goes back to how animals fight blind natural forces.
We're still doing that. We're still animals. We're still we still have the same need to establish dominance hierarchies, access to resources, clear ownership over who has resources.
And that's simply the case, as you mentioned, like, it's not just like the good that it's the case.
It simply is the case.
And there's no better, there's no worse.
You can have fantasies, you can have pacifistic dreams about how things could be, but it's
not the way things are.
And we do live in a world of survival of the fittest, of constant warfighting.
And perhaps soft war is a more ethical alternative, all things being equal, than hard war, than
bodies spilling blood, us killing our brothers and sisters.
And so that's kind of one of the uplifting.
If a person is completely demoralized by the realization that war fighting is part of our nature, an uplifting part of this thesis is maybe we can move on to soft war for some of our wars.
Like, you know, we're not, there's always going to be the need for hard war in the end in certain areas, but maybe a large part of that can be supplanted by soft war, by human out of the loop energy delivery competitions.
And maybe that's proof of work.
And maybe Bitcoin is the best example currently existing of that.
Yeah, I think it's evidentiary of the shroud of influence that we have lived under in this country for the last 50 or so years, if probably more, truly, where the idea of patriotism has always been hand in hand with war.
And the concept of not wanting to have wars has been, at least since my youth, I would say painted as a kind of a sissy's idea or, you know, just that it's not honorable.
Um, but I think what Lowry is saying, and I heard, I've, I've heard him say on a, on a podcast before, he's like, you know, like, look, I'm a soldier. Like I, I want war less than any of you. Like, understand, like you need to understand that like the people that, um, die in wars, like they're not excited about war.
Um, it's the, um, you know, it's, it's the upper level, upper echelon of those who continue policy by other means, um, in order to, uh, in order to resolve disputes.
And so I think it's just really an idea whose time has come and truly, truly just almost miraculous, really, that we're having this discussion kind of right now in the age of free speech with X and the ability to have conversations that couldn't happen otherwise.
where now we are considering a type of warfare that otherwise would not be considered.
Yeah, yeah. And a humane type of warfare, a warfare that brings moral, ethical and ideological benefits with it,
but also, and this is the interesting and necessary part, an extension of the way that war is actually done,
not an ideological pacifistic fantasy about what war should be, but simply another energy, another power delivery competition.
And that's what proof of work does.
And so like the objective of this work is really to establish this is the last section of the first chapter established kind of why he's talking about proof of work.
Proof of work historically began in the 1990s.
It was initially – so now proof of work is most famously instantiated in Bitcoin.
But initially it was just a cybersecurity kind of hypothesis or an innovation or something we're talking about as a possibility in cybersecurity that we could secure our information through energy competitions, through energy supply.
He makes a really interesting point here.
So proof of work, again, we think of it as this financial technology. But actually, when it was initially developed apart from Bitcoin, it was a separate development, a separate thesis, a separate theory being tested apart from Bitcoin, separate technology. It was actually first called bread pudding.
Obviously somebody, I didn't look this up, but I would say obviously somebody just giving a placeholder name for some type of technology that was going to have an indeterminate use.
And he's going to talk about this later in the book, that the names that we give things, especially within software, are often a name associated with that technology's or innovation's intended use, but does not perfectly describe the camp of possible uses that the technology has.
so too with proof of work that we call it proof of work, but even you can call it bread pudding
if you want. It doesn't matter. It is a thing when you know what that thing is. And possibly
that thing is going to have more uses than securing a financial network. It's maybe going
to have this broader use as a form of cybersecurity that's going to provide an energy-based
competitive form of warfare. Yeah. So Adam Back is the creator of proof of work.
And it was created in order to, you know, this is fascinating.
He was annoyed at getting spam emails and he was trying to create a way to make it costly for spammers to send him, you know, to basically break his defense.
And so that came about in 1996.
and I believe he did utilize it in his attempt at a digital currency called HashCash.
But then, you know, so it's 12 years later that it comes out in the Bitcoin white paper
as the consensus mechanism for how to confirm transactions.
and I like to think of this as like it's it's a you know it's just a race like it's fascinating
but it's just it's just a race like who can deliver the most power over the shortest amount
of time in order to find the answer to this difficult question and that which is what we're
talking about now, which could very well be the way that we engage in this newest domain of warfare
in cyber warfare that was created because some guy was just annoyed at getting, you know,
whatever it was, boner pill ads or something. Right. Yeah. And it, again, it speaks to this
idea that not everything is as it appears. And what you're first presented with is quite often
not what something truly is. Especially in the realm of cyberspace, where the ontology of things
is not the same as it is in the physical realm. So, I mean, that's the key distinction between
land, water, air, and space. Those all exist within three dimensions, our material. Cyberspace
is not. So the technologies that we use within it are maybe going to require some creative thinking.
And that's, again, the first Klaus-Witzian kind of criteria of warfare. It's that it's blind and
primordial, or the second one, rather, that it's a probabilistic game that requires the application
of creative spirits. And that's more than anywhere else in this cyberspace that we're going to need
to defend, we're going to need to use creativity.
We going to need to look and not fall prey to our own analytical bias of thinking somebody called Bitcoin money and therefore that all that it is And so that what this thesis wants us to do is kind of open your eyes
look at Bitcoin from a completely new perspective, turn it around in your hands. It's not just money,
it's also a defense network. And to do that, this thesis really has to go and does,
it's creating a whole new theoretical framework. And that's what's fascinating. And so it goes
clear-backed first principles. It's going to talk about evolution, animals, survival of the fittest
and developing survival technologies like antlers. And it's going to talk about all these other
things from really first principles perspectives to enable us to look with fresh eyes at this thing
that we've taken for granted as money because that's what we first heard it to be.
Yeah. The first conversation that you and I had about this was, I remember saying,
What I find fascinating is that it makes being perfect money the least interesting thing about Bitcoin.
But something I think that we can also consider is that, yes, Bitcoin might not just be money.
It might also be a defense network.
But money is a defense network.
So the more money you have, the more readily able to defend yourself against threats you are capable of. You can defend yourself against threats to your health by accessing the best doctors. You can defend yourself from threats to your freedom by accessing the best lawyers. You can defend yourself from threats to your body and your person by having the best security.
And so it is in a manner the same type of thing, just in an analog fashion where you have to deploy it in the physical world and you deploy it against threats that are coming in on certain vectors.
Um, so yeah, I think that it's, it's not only, it's not only unique to think about Bitcoin, um, that way, but it's also consistent, um, from kind of a philosophical standpoint of what can money do.
Um, I think, I think, you know, it can act as an analog defense network against threats from nearly any vector.
No, yeah. Money is a stand-in for all of the things we find valuable and useful in the world. It is the way we delineate value. It's clear why we need to defend our land, our seas, the air above us, the air that we breathe, the air that's over the land that we want to live in, and the space in which our satellites orbit.
cyberspace too it's it should be obvious why we need to defend that as if it were it is a theater
of operations because now our money exists in cyberspace we have green paper things we call
dollars but the dollar actually exists as a mark in an electronic ledger in a bank and bitcoin
makes of course dramatizes this because it has no material instantiation and in dramatizing this
also takes it very seriously by including its own defense network, not relying on the army to defend
it as the US dollar does. It doesn't require the US military to back it. It backs itself.
Yeah, the physical currency that we currently think about is really such a tiny portion of the
money that does exist in the world. Like you said, most of it exists as an entry in a ledger. It's
already digital. The only difference, and Andres Antonopoulos, I know, makes this point very well,
is that the only difference going forward is you have a choice of what money or what defense
network, now that we can maybe use those terms interchangeably, what defense network you use
in order to protect yourself against threats to your person and your property.
One of them is digital and it is able to be centralized or it already is centralized.
And the other is digital and it's decentralized.
So yeah, I would say, go ahead.
I was just going to say, just because of small, like terminological clarification,
Like it's not – like Lowry's thesis is not that money – so Bitcoin is both money and a form of cyberspace security and warfighting.
But that's not to say that money is necessarily a form of warfighting or self-defense.
Bitcoin happens by pure chance to fulfill both of these functions, but they're not – it's not necessarily so.
Like what Lowry is interested in is the proof of work aspect of Bitcoin, which is in the form of Bitcoin is incidentally very effective in securing financial information.
But it's also generalizable to the rest of cyberspace in securing all of our information, our identity, our medical information, our property rights, any sort of thing that can be that can exist in cyberspace, which is going to be more and more things.
right as we have a metaverse and all these things um everything that can exist in cyberspace
including money is defensible um through a power projection technique called proof of work
yeah um just to be able to have that option um yeah i don't know i
i have nothing to add to be completely honest there like that that was well said and i and he
walks it out well, he spells it out well, and I think you come to kind of the conclusion that,
yes, there comes a point in time when an innovation comes along that completely obviates the entire
way that everything had ever been done in a domain, and it makes it utterly indefensible
to continue moving in that same direction?
Yeah.
No, it's a new, an innovation has occurred.
Gunpowder is not medicine.
Proof of work is not just money.
And we need to take that seriously.
I mean, it does incidentally mean that Bitcoin
is vastly undervalued right now.
But that's because it is a money that embodied,
that is its own defense network.
And it's also a defense network
that can extend to things beyond money.
So the thesis, I mean, it's powerful for both an investment thesis in Bitcoin, but it's also powerful for like, we need to take it seriously because our national security is at stake. And that's why Lowry, an individual from a military perspective is writing this. And that's why we're contemplating a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
reserve. I mean, it's really important that we know what Lowry's thesis is, because it's something
that's in the news right now. And people don't necessarily understand why we should have a
strategic national reserve of Bitcoin. Understanding this thesis, though, throws a whole new light on
the necessity, not only of that, but perhaps far more greater investments and development of
proof of work as a way to secure all real world assets and extend software as much as possible
as a humane alternative to hard war. Yeah, software, I think, in the great tradition of
anything that my government doesn't want me to know is something that I want to know.
The reason why this thesis is no longer available as a book on Amazon is because it was cited
from a directive from the Department of Defense as a sensitive nature.
And I think that any time you see something like that,
it should raise all of your flags and should point you into that direction.
And when you think about the long-theorized hyper-Bitcoinization stage
of how we progress.
It does again take you back to why is it so important for Jason Lowery
to be saying these things, to be saying them in the way that they are,
and to be saying them with such urgency.
And it's because opting into this power projection technology
is something that you can do in an afternoon.
It's not building a nuclear warhead. It's not building a submarine. It's not building a cannon. It is merely taking the profit that is provided to you by knowing that there is a buyer for your fiat who will sell you Bitcoin.
and at any price it makes sense to have it because it is that valuable like just we all we all who
believe in bitcoin as um something that is growing in value i mean we see the evidence of it growing
in value but we believe that um it's going to be you know so much more valuable um just as a money
I think such a very small amount of people would consider the value of it as a domain of defense.
Yeah. I mean, you say it's not a nuclear warhead. What it is analogous to, though, is buying a handgun to defend your house from intruders because it's obtaining a form of money that is also a form of self-defense of that money because it's not subject to inflation.
It's not also, I mean, the specific manner in which Lowry talks about the proof of work is secured from appropriation.
So he mentions this kind of in passing, like the Second Amendment potentially should cover Bitcoin because it is, I mean, it is a form of self-defense to acquire something that is secured by a proof of work protocol because you're acquiring a piece of information.
but a real thing given side given the importance of cyberspace that is self-securing that is
secured by proof of work in the same way we might secure our own house not just with the deed
recorded in the local courthouse but with a handgun under the pillow like proof of work is sovereign
self-defense for people who don't want to you know who do want to invest in their own individual
I don't think that's Lowry's going that far. This is like a thesis about national self-defense. But the individual can read it and say, I am from a nation of free men and women that does have a Second Amendment. And I do believe in self-defense, sovereign self-defense. And I want Bitcoin because it is self-defending money.
I think it's just recognizing that it makes more sense to use logic to determine where you're going to fight your battles than to actually fight your battles with logic and hope that that works out.
where you can logically look at the system that we have in place and without condemning it,
without even speaking ill of it, you can say it is subject to corruption. It is inherently flawed.
And now there exists a system that is not subject to the same flaws and shortcomings.
And logically, if I'm going to engage in a competition, I want to play a fair game.
I just like I'm not it's not it's not being a nuclear bunker in the backyard, head to toe, covered in guns and grenades, anarchist.
It's simply it's simply saying I want to play fair.
And this is where the fair fight or this is where the fair game is being played.
And so that's where I'm going to go.
Yeah, definitely.
Yep.
I think that that covers the first chapter and it hints toward the second, the gesture
towards the second, which is going to be a discussion of what grounded theory is as a
methodology, which sounds very abstract from what Bitcoin is.
And it is, it's kind of a methodological discussion, but it's going to help.
The really important part about software, again, is it's a turning of Bitcoin in our
hands to see the backside of it, to look away from financial, monetary, economic theory from
a perspective of military theory. And grounded theory methodology is a description kind of how
Jason Lowery is able to take this kind of free form, non-analytically biased look at something
like Bitcoin that has been so coded as a financial technology and look at it with free eyes. So I
think it's going to be a great discussion because we are going to talk about how to help ourselves
think and talk about a subject that's already been thought and talked about to death with new eyes.
I agree. Absolutely. Like it is, this is the first thing that I've come across
about Bitcoin that is taking me back to that, ooh, ah, um, inspiring type of feeling that I had when
I first found it. So, um, which is just fascinating to be able to fall in love again, I guess,
in a way with something that I thought that I knew a lot about and even felt like I maybe had
theorized some of these things, but certainly not this. And so I'm looking forward to continuing in
because, I mean, not only is the subject matter fascinating and very compelling, but Jason
Lowry's a good writer and it's an enjoyable read. And it's for anybody who listens to this
conversation, just because this is a PhD thesis, like don't shy away from it. It is not difficult
at all to read and understand. He writes it at a level that, um, uh, you know, some dummy like me,
who's just used to reading Tom Clancy novels can, can get easily. So, yeah. And, and I think he does
a great job of it.
Yeah, no, that definitely
bears mentioning.
This is a very,
it doesn't read like a thesis
in that it's well written
and actually you want to read it.
You're not forced to read it
by dint of being an academic.
It's really, it's worth it.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, I think absolutely great.
Great place to stop
and we'll do chapter two next.
Awesome.