Galtland Index

Softwar

3 min read

Softwar

Softwar is Jason Lowery’s 2023 MIT System Design and Management master’s thesis on Bitcoin, proof-of-work, and national strategic security. Its distinctive claim is that Bitcoin can be analyzed as electro-cyber power projection: a way to impose real physical costs in, from, and through cyberspace.

What the Thesis Argues

Lowery argues that most Bitcoin analysis begins from finance, monetary theory, or economics, and therefore risks missing a different strategic function. His alternative frame is Power Projection: living organisms, states, and computer networks secure valuable resources by changing the cost of attack. On this reading, proof-of-work is not merely accounting machinery for digital cash. It is a physical-cost protocol that lets users attach real-world energy expenditure to control over bits.

The thesis calls this tactic “softwar” because the physical contest is electric and cybernetic rather than kinetic. Lowery’s strongest claim is not just that Bitcoin has monetary uses. It is that Bitcoin may be a new power-projection technology for securing digital information, including but not limited to financial information.

Thesis Structure

Chapter 1 introduces the problem: Bitcoin’s proof-of-work may have national-security implications that are obscured when it is treated only as money. Chapter 2 explains the grounded-theory methodology. Chapter 3 builds the natural-world side of the theory, connecting survival, resource control, and physical cost. Chapter 4 applies the theory to human society and develops Abstract Power Hierarchies. Chapter 5 applies the framework to software, cyberspace, proof-of-work, and Bitcoin. Chapter 6 gives research and policy recommendations, including the claim that the United States should treat proof-of-work as strategically significant infrastructure.

Place in This Wiki

This is an external, non-libertarian source. Lowery writes as a US Space Force officer and MIT SDM fellow for a national-security and Department of Defense audience. His policy conclusions are not the same as this wiki’s libertarian sources.

The thesis is useful here because its analytic scaffolding overlaps with several libertarian concerns: concentrated authority, state-monopoly institutions, coercive control over infrastructure, and the need for resistant tools. That overlap is clearest next to Praxeology of Privacy and The Praxeology of Privacy. Hillebrand frames Bitcoin as resistance and parallel-economy implementation from an Austrian-libertarian direction. Lowery frames Bitcoin as electro-cyber security and physical-cost power projection from a national-security direction.

Limits

The confidence level is medium because the source is a completed MIT thesis and can be summarized directly, but the thesis is a novel grounded theory rather than a settled consensus. The wiki should not treat Lowery’s claims as established computer science, military doctrine, or libertarian theory. It should treat them as one strategic interpretation of proof-of-work that is important enough to map.

See Also

Sources

Graph View

Backlinks