Galtland Index

Softwar

4 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

  • Jason Lowery - author reference for the thesis
  • Power Projection - foundational analytic frame used throughout the thesis
  • Abstract Power Hierarchies - Lowery’s account of rule-based and belief-based control systems
  • Praxeology of Privacy - nearby Bitcoin-as-resistance thesis from a different starting point
  • The Praxeology of Privacy - adjacent Hillebrand source for Bitcoin, privacy, and resistance
  • Privacy and Cryptography - topic map for Bitcoin, privacy, proof-of-work, and resistance
  • Proof of Work - Hashcash-to-Bitcoin cost-function lineage underlying Lowery’s power-projection frame
  • Bitcoin Whitepaper - primary Bitcoin design source later interpreted by Lowery
  • Satoshi Nakamoto - pseudonymous author of the whitepaper that Softwar later reframes as electro-cyber power projection
  • State Power and Intervention - libertarian state-power frame that overlaps with Lowery’s critique of concentrated abstract authority
  • The Sovereign Individual - Davidson and Rees-Mogg book Softwar cites (ref. 44); its megapolitics frame underlies Lowery’s power-projection theory
  • Megapolitics - the violence-cost theory Lowery quotes and builds the power-projection lens upon
  • The Offense–Defense Balance of Technology - Every technology tilts power toward attack or defense by changing the cost of predation versus protection — and state formation and dissolution track the shifts. Gunpowder built the state
  • Bitcoin Frees the Individual, Not the Collective - A response to Soleimani’s Mises Wire critique: Bitcoin does not dismantle any state and never could, but it delivers real if bounded freedom to the individual who self-custodies
  • Farewell to Westphalia - Hope & Ludlow’s 2025 book: the nation-state is a 380-year-old governance technology; blockchain communities — voluntary, exit-based, borderless — are the successor under construction.

Sources

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