All right, so Lucas and I today were talking about chapter three of Jason Lowry's thesis,
Softwar, a Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin.
We had two previous conversations.
The first one, we did the executive summary and the introduction.
That was a really broad overview of the whole thesis of the thesis.
And then the second conversation was the methodology that Lauer used in doing his qualitative assessment that enabled him to formulate his thesis.
So chapter three is power projection tactics in nature.
And so how we kind of got here then is that the thesis is that kind of, I think, we haven't got finished the book or the thesis, obviously,
But the thesis, roughly speaking, is that Bitcoin is a novel way to project power into cyberspace in the same way physically, in the same way that armies project power on land, navies project power on sea in order to secure vital thoroughfares.
And so that's kind of the overall thesis. And then now we kind of take a step back and we're going to build up to establishing the validity of that thesis by starting at kind of ground one or kind of the ground, the square one, power projection tactics in nature.
And we're going to build chapter four is, I think, power projection tactics in human society and then on to applying Bitcoin as power projection into cyberspace.
So this, again, power projection tactics in nature will not get us directly to Bitcoin, but it's going to get us far enough there where we can start talking about it.
And so there's I'll try to get all the ideas on the table.
And then, Lucas, you can help me patch holes in what I what I missed.
There's a lot of really interesting concepts here.
That's the nature of this thesis.
We talked about the methodology last time.
It's drawing from a lot of different areas.
It's just really volatile in that way, intellectually volatile,
in that it kind of goes from here and there, but it does tie it all together,
and it's incredibly interesting in all of its parts.
So we'll try to get enough of those parts on the table to understand what the chapter is about,
but we're certainly, I'm not going to, in this little introduction,
before we get going, say all the parts.
So I think to where to start is that ownership of property is not an abstraction.
It needs an owner.
And so there needs to be a protocol to decide, a way to decide who that owner is.
And this chapter talks about there's kind of two ways you can divide that, power or beliefs.
Beliefs would be deciding the ownership of property, like first come, first serve,
as a way to do it as a pure belief-based abstraction.
finders keepers or even our rule of law these are all beliefs that are abstractions that say
this person owns a piece of property but the kind of basic meta way to own property is power that's
that's what animals do there's a proof of power protocol for owning property that is not an
abstraction it is how many watts you can project to achieve the consensus over the rightful owner
of a piece of property. Say a carcass of meat on the ground, a wolf comes up to it and snarls to
make the other wolves in the pack, and other predators acknowledge that the wolf that is
snarled is the one who is projecting the most watts, and so is projecting the most power, and so has
an objective physical signature over that piece of property. That's the proof of power protocol
establishing an objective marker for ownership that's not belief-based.
It's not the wolf's belief that he got there first and so owns the property.
It is, I'm the most powerful, I'm projecting that power, and so ownership is acknowledged.
There's positive and negatives to a proof-of-power protocol,
projecting power as a way to mark one's ownership objectively.
The negative is that it's energy-intensive.
It's about who can project the most watts of power.
It's also prone to causing injury.
Obviously, if it has to escalate into a battle, into a probabilistic physical power competition to determine the legitimate owner, both sides can be injured.
So those are the negatives.
The positives, it's zero trust.
No one has to trust the wolf.
It's about who has the most power.
In that way, it's also egalitarian.
Everybody is subordinate to watts.
There's no rule of law that someone can manipulate.
It's also permissionless. You don't have to get permission from others to project your power or to take over a resource.
You simply have to project power over that resource to acknowledge your ownership.
So Lowry in the thesis then goes deep.
So there's an evolutionary argument in here, an evolutionary story beginning with abiogenesis,
the very kind of genesis of organic matter from inorganic matter.
Lowry talks about pressurized membranes forming over vents to capture resources
as kind of the most basic form of power projection.
It's just a membrane passively pushing back against things that come into contact with it,
but it is marking off, delineating, owning objectively a pool of resources
around some hydrothermic event in some primordial soup.
so this leads, this very basic way of power projection
by inorganic matter leads to structuring order
from chaos based on these resources are acquired, more and more structure
develops, again this is an evolutionary
story and the organic emerges
from the inorganic colonies of microorganisms organizing the single
celled organisms, single celled organisms
organized into multicellular organisms and you get basically a darwinian inspired ecological arms
race um that in which um of course i think we're all familiar with that story a little bit that
the if you're not fit and adapted to your environment if you're fat and lazy then you
get devoured and your resources get repurposed by those who are fit and adapted that way leads to and
That leads to an innovator die in which those that are most fit and adapted, lean and mean, devour those who are docile and fat.
And this, again, is an ecological arms race motivating an innovator die framework in which novel power projection techniques are further developed.
We move from that membrane into other sorts of things.
So just take one step back from that.
As part of that evolutionary framework, we have predation as something that emerges.
Predation is just when those who are weak are devoured by those who are strong in order to acquire their resources.
So those who can project the most power claim the weak essentially as their resources and devour them.
The negatives to that are obvious.
Darwinian evolution is red in tooth and claw.
It's a horrific process.
The positives, though, there is a positive to predation and that it weeds out the unadapted, redirects resources to those who are most fit to survive.
If there wasn't predation, the other protocols that don't involve proof of power that lead to predation would lead to a centralized, unimpeachable monopoly over resources.
If it was finders, keepers, or whoever got there first, then they just amassed their resources, and that right is unimpeachable.
There's no way to break it up.
But if it's power, then somebody can come in and knock up the monopoly, and resources can be redistributed based on who has the most power.
As part of this ecological arms race, again, we get different power projection tactics emerging.
We get the emergence of predation that accelerates this Darwinian arms race as predators emerge to pick off the weak.
cooperation emerges as a power projection tactic um it emerges interestingly unconsciously
no eyes no brain these kind of single-celled organisms begin to clump together um
lowry says no sight no foresight no eyes no brain no ideology no morality saying get together guys
they're literally cells just stuck together um these cells then colonize um or conquer uh two
ways that cooperating organisms can take on and kind of acquire resources they can colonize by
invading we know invasive plants move in and colonize a region or they can conquer which is
what kind of humans do cooperating humans we co-op we conquer an area and then subjugate all
the resources. Cooperation leads to pack animals, which are animals that are cooperating as a group,
which leads to the necessity of distributing resources within that group, which leads to a
further necessity of how do you then distribute those resources among cooperating members of a
group. And this implicates a dominance hierarchy or pecking order. Pack animals have to cooperate
to see who gets what within the proof of power protocol.
How do you do that?
Determine who gets what among cooperating animals.
What's been universally established is that,
again, it's a proof of power protocol.
The most powerful alpha projects, and they feed and breed.
So under the dominance hierarchy,
the most resources and the breeding rights or whatever
go to the most powerful member of the pack.
that then has a positive reinforcing feedback mechanism
of breeding more and more powerful people to protect the pack
so there's also a virtuous cycle to what seems like a very vicious
endeavor which is kind of common
with a lot of Darwinian stuff. It's horrible in the specifics but
we see value emerging from something that's horrible as
fitness and adaptation are the results of a very messy and bloody process
so again dominance hierarchy is not they're determined by the proof of power protocol
not by a belief protocol we let's see here i think another important point to get on the table
in this is that domestication becomes a risk and a systemic danger if a proof of power protocol is
not selected or is consciously selected against for example wolves become dogs if you castrate
them and select for if you castrate the vicious and aggressive and strong ones and you select for
the deformed and passive ones and then breed those you can then domesticate and turn a species
into something that cannot project its own power and domesticate it and humans can also become
domesticated if a dominance hierarchy for humans is not motivated by a proof of power protocol.
Were animals subject to Darwinian adaptive forces just as wolves are?
I think, I'll just end putting the last concept, I think, on the table, and then, Lucas, you
can add whatever other ones that I kind of missed in patching this together.
So we've seen that the proof of power protocol is natural in nature.
It is, in fact, what nature has selected for as a way to divide resources,
to determine the owner of resources objectively,
both interspecies and intraspecies through dominance hierarchies.
Those dominance hierarchies, a negative aspect of those,
again, the proof of power protocol, one of the negative aspects,
One, it's energy intensive, but two, prone to physical injury.
Two wolves are fighting, they could hurt each other.
They kind of evolutionarily developed then this reflex where one wolf will not clamp down for the killing bite once it subdues another wolf in a dominance contest.
The metaphor that Jason Lauer really settles on as kind of the perfect example of this for what he's going to go on to do with Bitcoin is the beauty of antlers.
So antlers are this complex geometry of horn on the head of a deer.
What they serve to do is as a buffer when two deer are engaged in the dominance contest.
There's a physical projection of power between them.
They're hitting prone to injury, except for these antlers are, one, the antlers would help them against a predator externally.
But in the power competition, because the antlers hit the antlers, they actually serve as a buffer.
So they make it a safer way for them to settle disputes.
So there's been the evolution of a power projection protocol for intraspecies, dominance hierarchies for deer.
So, again, all that's very suggestive.
The next chapter is actually going to go on to apply a lot of this to human society,
and then after that to apply it to Bitcoin.
I don't know if this is relevant, but I had this quote from Sicario I wanted to read because I think it is in some way.
This is at the end when Alejandro, the Sicario, the hitman, is counseling or saying to a small town cop type person who's not ready for the type of violence she's encountered.
He says, you should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists.
You will not survive here.
You are not a wolf, and this is the land of wolves now.
so when evolutionary theories
applies the world is always
the land of wolves and power projection
is always what determines
who lives and who dies
who replicates and who becomes the future
so that's kind of I think the main points
Lucas what did I
what gaping holes did I leave in
the summary of this chapter
no gaping holes
just
when I think about
so I guess I don't think about it in terms of like
horrible or bad
or that it's a negative that power is expended or that it's a negative that injury is possible.
I think about the benefit-to-cost ratio, which Lowry talks about,
and that benefit-to-cost ratio is a decision that's made prior to projecting power.
And so in the example of, let's say you're outmatched greatly by something or someone that can project much more power than you,
that if you aren't able to basically get lucky with like a first mover attack, then you are going to be utterly demolished.
And so that's actually, it's good for avoiding conflict because when you have a rational actor who is choosing not to engage in a power projection competition due to a low benefit cost ratio, then you end up with actually much less attacks and much less violence than you would otherwise.
And I think the way that we see this play out in Bitcoin and in cryptocurrency world is you've got the two different.
Well, I guess there's a couple more.
Two effectively two main types of consensus protocols You got proof of work and you got proof of stake And proof of stake is just everybody who has a share gets a vote for however many shares they have And proof of work is it the power projection competition
Who can project the most power is able to solve the block and thus be able to write the transactions.
And then the counterbalance of that is that everybody else has to agree.
And so that's like recognizing the power hierarchy where when somebody solves a block and they broadcast the answer to all the other miners and the miners go, yep, you got the right answer.
We're going to go ahead and confirm this block.
What you've done is you have established that pecking order of a dominance of power projection.
and therefore it is a waste like the benefit cost ratio is not worth it for someone to try and attack
the bitcoin network because let's say you were able to overpower the network for 10 minutes and
then try to rewrite transactions in your name then what would happen is that the competitors
would just simply not recognize your power they would branch off to another fork and you would
lose all of that value. On the other side, you've got proof of stake, which most notably Ethereum.
You can basically attack proof of stake as much as you want for effectively no cost. I mean,
it's basically all the cost you have is organizing a political monopoly by engaging other large
stakeholders and saying, hey, let's get together, let's all vote the same way, and let's not
confirm these transactions as suggested, and let's rewrite them in our own name.
And we've seen that happen with Ethereum before, and obviously with other protocols as well.
So I think that's something that you can literally take from that single cell organism all the
way up to where we're at to the cyberspace.
But going back, I mean, there's just so many things that you can think of in life where
this is relatable.
Like, and Lowry, I've seen in interviews, does a really good job of making sure that
we aren't talking about this in terms of an offensive or defensive power projection tactic.
It's an active or a passive one where, you know, so a border wall, that's something that's high in the public consciousness right now.
Is a border wall an active or is it an offensive or a defensive thing?
And some people would say it's defensive, but other people would say, well, if nothing existed there before and you put a wall there, you are doing something first.
and so therefore that's offensive but really what it is it's passive it's a passive power
projection tactic that if you try to be active against that if you try to punch that wall run
into that wall climb over that wall it will most likely impart some kinetic energy upon you that is
destructive to your continued long-term health.
I'm sitting in a car right now.
And so this car is like my membrane.
It's protecting me and all of my resources against the ravages and the entropy of weather.
And when we're able to do that, when we are able to put a wall around things,
and we see this in the Bible too, right?
the uh the um what is it called what is the the walled garden right um nirvana um that we have the
walled garden um and the walled garden what does it do it keeps um peace inside and it keeps other
things at bay and it allows for you to thrive within that yeah yeah so yeah yeah go ahead i
just want to say like right i mean i think that's so paradise the walled garden right yeah like
that's actually etymologically where it comes from,
per ed, like that's wall.
So it's essential to the framework that if you're going to have that,
it's going to be demarcated by some power projection technique.
Even the afterlife has separated us from us
by something projecting power to prevent us from acquiring it unduly.
I just wanted to note that you're totally right
when you mentioned that the benefit to cost ratio of attack,
Lowry has formalized a way where he talks about
when predation occurs, when the benefit of attack is greater than the cost of attack.
And so this is technical in part.
He develops a way, he calls bowtie notation,
of really pictorially representing this process of how kind of we select
for an increasing cost of attack or increasing power projection over time.
And so his thesis, again, very technical but very good.
And another type of kind of technical thinking that he uses is systems thinking, where you analyze a system.
And you touched on this by looking.
Systems thinking enables us to hold the function of a system constant and look at the different forms that a system might take.
So, for example, for typing, for word processing or whatever, the function of the system is like the production of the words.
The form might change from manual typewriter to touching a screen, something like that.
So we can look at the function of a survival system as like decreasing entropy.
He talks about that in this as well, or surviving.
And then what are the function is to survive?
What are the different forms that enable this?
and you said you were in your car that's a membrane,
there's a border wall that's like a protective membrane,
that's a good way of systems thinking because it connects us back to the membrane
stretched over a hydrothermic vent at the aviogenesis of life itself
as a power projection technique.
The form is different, but it's comparable to what we're still from a pressurized membrane,
than shells for animals and bark for trees,
those protective coverings, walls nowadays,
the car that's protecting you.
We see the evolution of that, so to speak.
So I think that, again, there's a lot of complexity and subtlety
in the way that he's talking about the development evolutionarily
of these different power projection techniques
and really carefully tying them back to nature,
that these emerge from nature.
And there's a sort of naturalistic argument that he's justifying our use of power projection techniques by saying it emerged in nature and it has been bestowed upon us in this evolutionary path that embeds a certain wisdom of like four billion years or whatever of incremental development.
And so if you think another protocol is better than power projection, why has it not emerged from Darwinian process of selection as a way to successfully mark the ownership of property?
So, yeah, I just wanted to say that I think you're right on in how you're talking about that, that nature is consistent.
There's an analogy between nature and human power projection for sure.
Yeah, I think that people mischaracterize what humans do as non-natural at their own risk.
Because what you see occurring in the political world is a natural thing as well.
So we've got a, we've got cooperation which allows us to form groups.
And those groups create the herd mentality.
And that herd mentality, in order to maintain the health of the group, develops an ideology that they ascribe to.
And that ideology then divvies up the resources.
and if you were in a uh a pack of wolves and the lead wolves that were the best hunters
no longer got to eat more to eat better because they're doing all the work to kill all the game
if somehow everybody else ganged up on them and started saying well you're going to eat last
what would happen and what would happen would either be a fight as effectively a civil war
or those wolves would simply go to another pack and they would lead that pack in securing the
resources that the other pack needs to survive and that pack would die out and we see this i think
very clearly not only among the states in the united states with their different tax laws and
how they treat um how they treat the biggest hunters i mean if you're if if money if you know
if resources are you know are the way that we get energy and money is energy so the people that earn
the most money um if due to a collective ideology that says that we need to redistribute that
to other people that we unfairly take more from those than from those that are not producing.
What happens?
So Washington state passed a law that they called it the billionaire tax.
And what did Jeff Bezos do?
He moved to Florida.
He took his billions to Florida.
And they, you know, I remember reading the story like they expected $4 billion worth of state revenue from this.
but they forgot to mention that like 2.3 billion of it was expected to just come from Jeff Bezos.
And he was like, no, actually, I can just change my address.
I can get my newspaper somewhere else and I can keep that.
And you saw that with Elon Musk moving out of out of California and taking a trillion dollar company with him.
So now California no longer has that lead hunter.
and then collectively as a as a country the united states is you know it's the heaviest
taxed industrialized nation in the world and so what do we see is we see all of these incredible
developers and incredible entrepreneurs packing up and going to saudi arabia and portugal and
south america and just simply saying look if you're not going to respect the power that i have
for this pack, if you're not going to acknowledge this hierarchy,
then I will simply go to another pack where I am able to feast upon my share.
And so, yeah, I think I don't make a delineation between nature and humans
because I feel that what humans do, even if it is involved with some ideology,
those ideologies always self-correct back to a power projection a hierarchy a pecking order
you know so they can't last too long right the power projection protocol is always the ultimate
settlement layer for the ownership even if above it we've erected rule of law as a belief finders
keepers or whatever at the end of the day if you need to resolve a dispute objectively in the real
world, it's going to come down to power projection. The rule of law is only a rule of law because
there's an army that backs it up. But I think what you say is essential that we're continuous
with animals, that we are animals. And I think that's one of Lowry's big points in this chapter
is that the lessons that we can draw from the natural world are actually, I mean, they are
abject lessons for us they are they should be taken seriously because we are not as far from
animals as we might suppose the lot of things you mentioned people fleeing to better jurisdictions
defecting from a pack that is not rewarding the alpha male so to speak like these these are i think
why the danger of self-domestication like lowry goes into this that if you're not selecting within
a pack for
power
which is the ability
to project watts, which usually comes down to
strength and intelligence, intelligence more so
nowadays for humans.
If you're not selecting for that, then you run
the danger of
not multiplying those who
are best able to project
the most strong and the most intelligent, best able to
project that, which is systemically bad
for the whole pack. It's not just
bad, it's not good for
everybody in some sense if you can
get rid of
an act of mutiny against the Alpha
that seems oppressive or that seems to have
a lion's share of the resources.
It's actually systemically
a risk for the whole pack because,
like you point out, the Bezos' flee to
a better jurisdiction and the pack
becomes systemically weaker
and more open to somebody
else conquering it.
These are all hard truths, though.
In this chapter,
Lowry has a series
of disclaimers. I mean, you're
You accept this.
You, I think, have lived close to nature.
You've looked up at the night sky and seen the profusion of stars.
You saw that we're not a different thing.
But nowadays, I think people have a hard time accepting that.
And there are a series of disclaimers.
Because, again, I mean, evolution, you point out that the fruits of evolution, what it gives us, are good.
But the process, it is pitiless.
And it does weed out the weak.
and the weak are good in i mean in a christian sense i mean that was not to get too nietzschean
or whatever but like the the weak you know in in our in our kind of human framework we believe
those quote unquote the weak deserve to live and be a part of society and whatnot and also have
access to resources so these are hard truths when we begin to talk about darwinism becoming
like social darwinism that leap into that it becomes a bad word because people don't want to
import evolutionary facts, natural facts, into the running of a society that we think should be much
more compassionate towards those who are not the most powerful and the most intelligent.
So that, again, I think Lowry wants to, that's why he has a series of disclaimers in there.
He ultimately sides and does side explicitly with, I mean, that, again, not accepting the
evolutionary truths is going to lead to systemic risks to the pack to society but i mean i do
acknowledge that i think evolution is a horrific slaughter bench of a process that um from like the
failed abortions of the past the the stronger selected and you know like evolution kind of
throws mutations into the void to see which ones are going to survive and those that don't simply
their genetic material is is is you know a non-fact for the rest of history so it's a terrible process
but it's necessary yeah so again i i don't i don't think of it as terrible i think if you if you come
at it from the view of am i a fan of humans or am i a fan of certain humans and if you're a fan of
humans then it very good for humanity if you a fan of certain humans or if you happen to be one of those certain humans that coming out on the wrong side of it then obviously you know you not a fan of it
But I think about, I just got done doing an eight-day fast. So for eight days, I didn't eat. The reason why I didn't do it was, or the reason why I chose to do this, both my parents have contracted cancer.
I grew up on a farm, well aware now that there's a lot of things that I was exposed to that are cancerous, including the sugar that I ate and all that growing up.
And so the reason is because doing that fast, it induces autophagy, which autophagy is the recycling of damaged and weak cells in your body in order to repurpose those resources to make new and healthy cells.
And so I don't pity the loss of those damaged and weak cells because I cheer for the glory of what could be the whole, my body.
Right. And so it is a difficult process.
It is a violent process.
However, I would make the argument that it is far less violent than any other process that you could think of.
And the reason why I say that is like, what is the most violent ideology that's ever existed?
It's the fairest one, right?
Communism.
Like, everything's going to be fair.
Everybody's going to have what they need.
We're going to take care of everybody.
And then we're going to kill 150 million people in the most horrific ways in doing so.
So it's one of those, like, it sounds bad because people are not, many people are not willing to accept that any violence, any sort of competition is necessary.
But the truth is that, you know, capitalism is the least destructive form of an economy.
Power projection is the least destructive form of resource competition.
And I do believe, I will say this, though.
I do believe that, yes, we have transcended power projection in terms of pure physical power.
And we have moved to intelligence as a way to project power.
And we're seeing that right now.
We're seeing the people that are able to project.
Actually, I thought about this.
So you're human and you have a brain.
Thank you.
And that brain requires, yes, I've seen it.
And that brain has watts and it runs.
And it runs on electricity.
And one of the things that I don't know if, I don't think he explicitly notes it,
but power projection is not just projecting power.
It's projecting power over a surface area.
So I can, you know, I can push, or sorry, a surface area and a time.
So, you know, like the difference would be I can push a car and it can run into a wall
and it might exert X amount of power.
But if I take that same amount of power and I put it behind a bullet,
then I can blow straight through that wall.
So it's the same amount of power.
It's just condensed over a smaller surface area.
And so what is that?
Taking it from here to here, it's focus, right?
And so what are we doing when we're studying Bitcoin?
because we find that there is something about this that is different,
something about it that seems to be relevant,
is that we're taking this energy and we're focusing it on a single focal point.
And by doing so, we are projecting power towards something
that does have an asymmetric benefit to those who are able to project it
in the correct way, or not correct, but in that direction.
So, yeah, you could project the same type of focus on being a video game player and you would have certain skills and such.
Or you could project that type of focus towards something like this and obviously perhaps be at the forefront of a global financial revolution.
Yeah. So I want to push back again a little bit on what I see as the underlying horror of evolution.
But I want to acknowledge that what you say is absolutely correct, that power projection was settled upon as the protocol because it produced the most value over time in the ecological arms race that was evolution, including and being much better than alternate protocols, especially in the human realm of like communism, where these forced belief based systems are used as alternate protocols that lead to mass death.
right so you're absolutely right but so you know like that you were fasting autophagy you were
getting rid of these bad cells in order to ward off cancer but it is evolution itself apoptosis
is programmed cell death evolution itself also has given us cancer it has given us this limited
lifespan so that our genetic material makes way for new potential mutations iterations in order to
keep the evolutionary propulsion moving forward in this ecological arms race that we're now going to
you know keep on evolving because we don't live forever so evolution lowry refers to aging as a
form of suicide in here i thought that was a really existentially interesting remark i had
never looked at it that way that we age and die as an evolutionary tactic because again we want
to make way for new iterations of dna to potentially evolve new strategies to fit and adapt to make us
more fit and adapted to our environment um my pros my speaking is lured enough i think on the
the hordes of evolution but i'm reading nick land's zen of systems and he has a bit on darwinism that
i think goes right to the reason that lowry has disclaimers and also like the horror of of the
war of all against all that is evolution and the necessity of power projection is actually like
what validates his thesis for Bitcoin as a novel form of power projection,
physically projecting in a nonviolent way, I think we haven't got there yet,
but into cyberspace, like a war in which there's not bodies on the ground, right?
In which watts are projected without this fallout of death and dying around us.
But here's what Land says.
The logical consequence of Darwinism is that everything of value has been built in hell.
It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent,
but indeed, from a human perspective, indescribably cruel,
that nature has been capable of constructive action.
Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations
that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved with torturous inefficiency
from the chaos of natural existence.
All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard
of unbounded carnage requiring incalculable eons of massacres
to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages.
this is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection either
but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance
as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait
and then still further of the unavailable horrors that fitness or sheer survival itself predominantly entails
we are a minuscule sample of agonized matter comprising genetic survival monsters
fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite
this is still perhaps to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the whole story but it should
suffice so again like not to like revel or you know focus too much on the horrors of evolution
but i think that shows the reluctance of people to accept that analogy with nature and why lowry
has to dedicate a chapter to it and again why bitcoin if it can help us as a power projection
technique of the beauty of antlers again to wait a way to project power with less violence um you
know that's a good thing i'm going to push back on the pushback so i mean violent well so um okay
let's uh let's say that you can use the term horrific to describe evolution but compared to
what, right? So what's the next, like, is there a less horrific way to adapt and evolve?
You know, adapt or die, right? And so it could be that it's peaceful, but, you know, think about
a forest that we don't allow to burn naturally. What happens is that, oh, you know, things are
good, things are good, things are good, this is okay, this is okay, and then all of a sudden
everything burns in the most massive unstoppable tinderbox explodes and um and then everything
dies um so to let that natural selection occurs and that's why i said i you know personally i
just don't i actually think of it in the optimistic way like evolution is the the least violent least
horrific um you know you can you can look at it um just by itself but everything is relative you
You know, like, is Bitcoin the best?
Is Bitcoin perfect money?
Maybe, not sure, but it certainly is better than all of the other ones.
Is, you know, is round a better shape for a wheel than a square?
Or is it the perfect shape?
It might not be the perfect shape, but it's certainly better than a square.
So to look at everything, and truly, I think, I mean, really, to come at life without absolutes
and to come at life only with a relativistic perception
and to say this is better than that thing
because like as Thomas Sowell says,
there are no choices in life, there are only trade-offs.
We are always trading this for that
and any choice that we make means that we are saying no to every other thing.
And you see this so much with people in the Bitcoin community
Obviously, I don't know if there's a word for it yet, but just the general health and well-being of people improves when they realize that the longer they live, the more wealthy they get as opposed to the longer they live, the more fear of outliving their money they have and dying penniless and eating cat food.
that yeah I just think that it's
I guess I try to I just think of it as like the optimistic
bent on it where yes yeah you can I think you can
acknowledge the violence but you in order to acknowledge
that evolution is violent and is destructive
we must also acknowledge that all other forms
of resource allocation
are inherently more destructive and more violent and more cruel and more unfair.
You know, that's the thing about a meritocracy or a lightning strike is it's fair in the grand scheme of things.
It's not fair to the guy that gets struck by it.
It's not fair to you if your house burned.
But generally speaking, it's like, hey, you could have lived at the beach where forest fires don't happen.
You know, so.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I agree with you.
evolution is what is
it's the process that
it's almost a logical process
that which is fit survives
the future is composed of what of the past
was the best of the past
because that's what got the resources
we can condemn it, wave our finger at it
but that doesn't matter
it's also like you say, compared to what
so I totally endorse that
Lowry, he has a section called
Nature is a Sociopath
so he does want to ram home to us
that nature has these things, but he's with you that, I mean, he wants, he says, like acknowledging
that nature is a sociopath, he says, means allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable for a short period
of time so we can better understand the dynamics of physical power projection and how it relates
to security and survivorship. So if we're, if we're, if we're honest with ourself about what
evolution entails and has entailed, then we'll be honest with ourselves going forward about
the need to project power in watts,
the inbuilt wisdom, inbuilt evolutionary wisdom of that.
And I guess I want to say also, too,
that there's a lot of really beautiful prose.
There's lots of beautiful prose in this poetic.
Lowry says in another part, I wanted to read this,
a quick glance into the night sky reminds us
that the universe does not owe us our lives.
We have what we have because we take it using physical power.
and I mean that's a beautiful quote
and it also
it's like a really practical aspect
of this chapter we can take into our daily
and personal lives is the need to be grounded
I think daily or
in some way in nature
if you live in a city you don't
see the stars, you forget your
smallness in the
grand framework of existence
if you take all of your meat off the
rack, pre-packaged, you don't know
the bloodshed that went into that
if your
you pet your cat, you play with your cat,
you roll a ball to your cat,
you don't think of the long process of cruel domestication
that went into turning a panther, a jaguar, or whatever
into this deformed Ewok creature that we now shower love upon.
So acknowledging nature in its fullness, in its horror,
and then stoically saying,
this is good, this is what is,
and this is what we have to deal with,
I think is like, yeah, it's what we need to do.
I think that's a really important part of not blinking, not looking away.
And I'm glad that Lowry does say nature's a sociopath.
And I'm glad that the framework or the groundwork, the foundation for his theory is built on truths too terrible or so terrible that usually we don't want to acknowledge them.
But he's saying, open your eyes and look and let's build a theory on this.
Yeah, I think sociopaths are fair, too.
I'm not sure if I can actually back that up, but I think, like, isn't a sociopath is somebody that, like, they truly care about no one other than themselves, and if they don't care about anyone but themselves, then obviously they're not picking favorites, you know.
So I think, you know, nature as a sociopath, again, it's meritocratic.
Yeah, yeah.
One thing I wrote down was that living is an act of projecting physical power to capture physical resources.
And having been through some dark times, I thought about that.
You know like we occasionally hear somebody like going through a depressed period of time where they describe it as basically being alive but not living And that truly is like people that are in that state they are not projecting physical power
They're not jumping out of bed and running five miles and doing push-ups and doing that.
They're just slowly moving through life with the minimum amount of physical power exerted.
Yeah.
And so, like, yeah, if you're not projecting physical power, if you're not doing stuff to capture resources, to get stuff, then you're truly not, you know, you're not living.
And I think that's such an encouragement for people that, you know, we have at times lived in a society that has really made evil those who produce and those who would dare, you know, would dare dare to do great things.
by calling them greedy or by accosting them for some sort of megalomical approach.
But if we think about it in that way, it's like such a wonderful thing to do.
Like you think about being able to bring a protective envelope of a membrane of resources around yourself and your family
so that those that you do love and care for, those that you are favoring,
have a better chance at survival and adaptation and being able to move forward.
So I think I'm glad that you bring that up because I don't think that it is,
I don't think anybody's talked about this enough, not to accuse anybody of not,
but the way that Jason Lowry writes is there's poetry to it.
And for anybody who, again, is following along with this and not reading because they're intimidated by picking up a Ph.D. thesis, I strongly urge you to go grab it because it really is beautiful writing.
It's thoughtful.
It's pensive.
And it paints a wonderful picture, even if at times it does talk about things that make us feel uncomfortable.
But that is, of course, how we grow.
That's how we get better.
yeah I think you're totally right to note the existential angle to this that power projection
is living and that in our daily lives um we can be conscious of that I mean we live within this is
the I think one of the disclaimers is about the sensitiveness of this but we live within a
dominance hierarchy every day you go to the office and there's a pecking order every day
you're with people there's a pecking order you know and so you're asserting dominance whether
you want to or not and you do want to you know you don't have to be a jerk but um have agency
and take responsibility for your life these are powerful things intelligence is power that's a
way to project power um dispel entropy dispelling entropy in any way is power making a tool to do
something better that's power um so yeah that's a beautiful point to make we have a an origin story
for agency and power projection here,
like aviogenesis.
I just think he starts with that.
It's just such a lovely,
like it's a creation story.
We start with literally the origin of life
begins as a power projection technology,
begins as a result of power projection technologies.
We get structure from chaos
because power is being projected
to cordone off resources in areas,
dispel entropy locally
so that structure can emerge in what is otherwise an entropic, constantly degenerating world.
And so from chaos, order is emerging through the projection of power.
And the chaos is terrible. We've beat that to death.
But the order is also beautiful, as you point out.
And it's the order we have in our daily lives.
And we can have more of it if we do take the agency and do those things that you mentioned.
Yeah, and Bitcoin actually is more fair for the little guy than real life.
So you think about the way that the mining competition works.
If it was purely power projection, then Mara or one of these big mining pools, they would win every single block.
But that's actually not the case.
And you've seen, if you follow on X every once in a while, you'll see that, you know, like a solo miner mined a block.
And the odds of that happening are insane.
But it is because it is first a power projection competition, but there also is luck involved where it's like, you know, where does it start?
Where does it start to crunch numbers and start to make guesses and get there?
in the real world, you don't get that type of fortune and luck.
And the way I think about this is like,
so you think about like what Bitcoin mining is.
Everybody has the same equipment.
Everybody has ASICs and they're competing.
The real only competition is who can have the cheapest power.
So who can keep their miners on the longest when the price goes down
and it becomes untenable to carry on.
But the way that I think about this in the physical world, in our world, is you think of a NASCAR race or you think of an IndyCar race.
Like, they have the same engines.
Like, they have the same bodies.
They have the same type.
Like, everything is the exact same and it has to be the exact same.
And then the winner is based upon strategy.
And it's based upon intelligence.
And it's based upon reaction time, which is effectively just adaptation.
And so we get to see this play out in real life where I, again, like there's so many things that are beautiful about Bitcoin.
And this is one of them is that it is it is not only meritocratic, but it also has a chance of luck in it that gives you hope that, you know, if I was if I was to enter a weightlifting competition.
I would never have any chance of winning.
However, if I was to enter a Bitcoin mining competition,
I would actually have a chance of winning.
It's minuscule.
It's minuscule, but it does exist, and it does happen, and we see it.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's kind of pretty, too.
I like that.
Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see.
I haven't got that far.
How Lowry does describe the probabilistic element of Bitcoin mining.
I mean, he does say right up front that acknowledges in his definition through Clausewitz in the first conversation of the nature of war that it does involve a probabilistic element.
And he defines like a battle is a test that it's like a probabilistic physical power competition determined legitimate owner of something.
So he does acknowledge that that that probability and chance is an aspect of it.
And, you know, the stronger even the stronger amongst two wolves doesn't automatically win.
they do damage there's the possibility for the play of chance one had an off night of sleep or
whatever so yeah it's going to be interesting to see where we again have saw in this chapter
we've got a we've gotten an evolutionary story about nature um that there's so much truth in
it it's almost difficult to look at from that we're then going to talk about how that applies
to human society and then from that we're going to talk about the role of bitcoin as a form of
power projection analogous to what occurs in nature so we now have that foundation we've now
accepted the terrible truth of darwinian selection and even knowing that we know that there is
antlers there is the beauty of antlers out there there are power projection technologies that can
begin to make more pacific and less damaging than this the necessary projection of power to secure
resources. Yeah. Well said. Very well said. I like, um, you know, it is the only thing again,
I'll push back on the pushback on the pushback. It's not the, you know, it's not the, the horrific
terror. It's the beautiful, you know, the beauty, you know, it's, it's all in what side of the coin
you're looking at. Um, so yeah, it's, uh, it's a cool journey to go through this book with you.
and it's been fun.
And man, yeah, let's keep at it.
You got anything else that you're throwing out here?
Man, I had an unnecessary quote
from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
I had a bunch of, I'm not going to end with that though.
I want to end with something that Lowry wrote
because I have some more of his.
And again, such beautiful writing.
Some of these are really aphoristic.
Like nothing in our observations of the universe
indicates that life on earth has an inherent right
to live or to keep living.
So that's a dark truth,
But we've talked about that, and I think that it's backed up.
I also, I mean, that's a separate point.
Maybe I don't want to get into that.
We don't want to get into that.
But we could end there.
That's dark and pessimistic enough to keep us going for the next time.
I'll throw something in there, which is I told you this a while back.
I can't remember how I came up with it.
It's partially original, I assume.
But it's the idea that that which seeks to protect you is that from which you need protected.
And I believe that that is true both in the sense of an ideology that claims that it's going to offer you protection and also in the form of a superior organism that offers you protection.
You know, one can destroy you in political ways.
One can destroy you in physical ways.
But any time that there is something offering you protection, be it protection from recourse for an action or protection from just anything, it's always something to keep an eye out for.
And I like that Bitcoin doesn't offer me protection other than I have a world and an army of miners that when I own Bitcoin, they are the warriors of that herd.
They are the ones that are fighting and killing for me.
And we have a block reward that properly feeds those wolves at the head of the pack for the kills, for the power that they project.
And I'm just the little domesticated pup on the inside just loping along.
Not if you're a holder, though, man.
For my sacks.
I don't think so.
I think if you're a holder, you're not on the side of domestication.
Those who are holding fiat currency are those who have been domesticated and think that somebody will always protect them.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
You're placing your belief and your trust into a trusted third party.
And as we know, trusted third parties are security holes, and there has never been.
There's never existed.
And I think this is such a prescient point that people really need to think about.
if they're on the fence, if they're considering owning Bitcoin and they don't,
is that every other type of money, every other type of investment,
every other type of everything that you have in life involves counterparty risk.
And it involves trust in an institution or a third party.
And there has never been an instance, and I repeat, never been an instance,
where a trusted third party has not abused the trust that has been put into them, ever.
there's just no such thing as an infallible institution or an infallible person.
And you can come at this, again, from the biblical side of it,
where we're all sinners, we're all broken,
we're all prone to doing the wrong thing.
And so, yeah, keep that in mind if you want to have something pristine on your side
in order to protect your life source and your life synergy.
man i do want to end with him with reading this long and unnecessary cormac mccarthy quote so
you could like if you don't want to hear you just tune out and you want to miss much but
it's it's good pros man i think it's relevant so here we go um games of sport involve the skill
and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in
themselves sufficient stake because they adhere in the worth the principles and define them
But trial of chance or trial of worth, all games aspire to the condition of war.
For here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Here's the key part.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives.
Who has not heard such a tale?
A turn of the card.
The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment,
which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his.
What more certain validation of man's worth could there be?
This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate.
The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable,
and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one.
In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated, the decisions are clear.
This man, holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand, is thereby removed from existence.
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.
Seen so, war is the truest form of divination.
It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will,
which because it binds them is therefore forced to select.
War is the ultimate game because war is at least a forcing of the unity of existence.
War is God.
so that's a strong statement of
evolution, a strong statement
of a probabilistic battle leading to the
eradication of
that which will not replicate
and become the future
a strong statement of
the nature of existence
as kind of inherently
bound with war
and a strong statement that
war is not a matter
of fate, that it is
again probabilistic
but its determination takes on the nature of divination as an outcome that was kind of foreordained at the beginning by the cards that were dealt.
There's a Bitcoin analogy in there somewhere, but I don't know where it is. What do you think?
Well, that war is a game and that game is a competition.
And so war as a competition doesn't have to be destructive. It doesn't have to be violent.
It can simply be watts projected through Bitcoin mining in order to take a chance and take a shot at that divination and that probabilistic occurrence in order to resolve a competition over that which is desirable to all and is sustainable to life to all.
So beautifully done.
Beautifully done.
There it is.
That's all I got.
We'll catch you guys next time.
Later.
Stop.