Galtland Index

Power Projection

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Power Projection

Power projection, in Lowery’s Softwar, is the use of power to secure resources by changing the physical cost of attack. The thesis contrasts physical-cost power projection with abstract power projection and then argues that proof-of-work may allow physical-cost competition to operate in cyberspace.

Physical-Cost Power

Lowery begins from nature. Organisms survive by securing resources against predators, competitors, and entropy. The key variable is not moral permission but cost: if attacking a resource is too physically costly relative to the benefit, attack becomes unattractive. Antlers, claws, pack coordination, weapons, fortifications, navies, and air forces are different technologies for the same functional problem.

In this frame, physical power is costly, exogenous, and hard to counterfeit. It does not depend on belief in a rule or office. It works whether the target accepts it or not. That is why Lowery treats physical-cost power projection as a zero-trust way of settling disputes over scarce resources.

Abstract Power

Human societies also use abstract power: law, rank, office, title, ideology, software permissions, and other rule-based systems that allocate control without immediate physical confrontation. Abstract power can reduce direct violence and energy expenditure, but Lowery argues that it creates a different security problem. The controller’s authority lives inside a belief system or ruleset, so the people who write, interpret, or administer that system can exploit it.

That distinction connects Lowery to this wiki’s existing articles without making him a libertarian source. State Power and Intervention criticizes monopoly authority as legalized privilege. Nonaggression and Property Rights grounds legitimate control in persons, property, and consent. Lowery instead uses a strategic-security vocabulary: abstract authority becomes dangerous when it centralizes control and cannot be physically checked.

Proof-of-Work as Power Projection

The thesis’s Bitcoin move follows from the same distinction. Ordinary software constrains computers with logic. Proof-of-work constrains behavior by making certain actions physically costly in watts. Lowery therefore treats Bitcoin as a protocol for converting physical power into bits and using those bits to impose costs in cyberspace.

This overlaps with Praxeology of Privacy, but the emphasis differs. Hillebrand treats Bitcoin and cryptography as tools for privacy, resistance, and parallel-economy implementation. Lowery treats proof-of-work as electro-cyber security: a way to project physical cost through a domain otherwise dominated by software-defined authority.

Limits

The confidence level is low because this is Lowery’s novel theoretical frame and remains contested. The article describes the frame as a source concept. It does not establish that Bitcoin is in fact military infrastructure, that proof-of-work has no close substitutes, or that Lowery’s national-security recommendations follow.

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