Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin by Jason P. Lowery is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the changes in our times.

Lowery shifts the lens of monitoring and using Bitcoin from one of finance and economics to one of national security and survival.

He defines the ethereal world as a place currently dictated by god kings and the Bitcoin network as man's antlers to for self defense in this ever-expanding space with counterintuitively yet result, proof-of-work.

The physical demand of hash power guarantees Bitcoiner's their digital property ownership.

He even goes as far as declaring that the third world war has begun, only most are not aware because we are not using the same weapons as the last one.

This one is sharper, as the internet, and the application layer media attacks directly the psyche.

After reading this book, I came away with a sense of purpose, a need to fortify my mind to uphold values of cypherpunk, integrity, and a free agency.

I also am eased now, knowing that this transition of power will not be one of violent revolution, but of trade.

Here are some quotes from the book:

There are solid technical and meta-cognitive grounds for sapiens having an instinctual fear of, or distrust in, or attraction to, good rhetoricians, (i.e., politicians, religious leaders. )To put it simply, peak storytellers or peak predators. They deserve caution.

Storytelling can therefore be seen as the glue that holds modern societies together. Without that glue, sapiens are both physically and psychologically incapable of cooperating together at levels exceeding small tribes. We literally don't have the time, energy, or memory capacity for it. This means a primary value-derived function of storytelling is to overcome the constraints of shared objective physical reality. We use our spoken and written stories to bypass the constraints of physics as well as the constraints of our own bodies to communicate with each other, and inspire each other, cooperate with each other, and achieve things we would otherwise be both physically and psychologically incapable of achieving.

If an intelligent, intellectually honest reader can acknowledge there's merit to this line of reasoning, then they should understand the argument for why there are very important, complex, emerging social benefits to warfare that we have a logical, moral, and more importantly, existential responsibility not to ignore. We must be willing to entertain an uncomfortable, potentially valid hypothesis that war provides an irreplaceable social and technical benefit to humanity. The self-inflicted stress of predation and global power competitions have clearly made life more prepared to survive and prosper against the universe-inflicted stress and entropy.

For whatever reason, probably because it is not necessary to understand computer science or write software, people keep falling into the same trap of forgetting this undisputed truth: that all computer programs are abstractions and can therefore be described in any different way using any imaginary concept, abstraction, or metaphor. People don't know a basic lesson of computer science: that the way any software engineer chooses to describe the function, design, and behavior of software, including, but especially its creator, is arbitrary. This not only leads to pointless debates, where people argue about what the right metaphor is to describe software as if there's an objective answer. Obvious to the fact that there can't be an objectively right way to describe an imaginary abstraction, but it also leads directly to security incidents because the metaphors we use often hide safety and security-critical design information in a technique commonly known as information hiding. Software engineers consider it to be a virtue to create abstractions that suppress as much of the technical detail about a computer program as possible. The more information and details are suppressed by software abstraction, the better it is perceived to be. At this point, it should be clear to the reader that if the goal is to hide as much information as possible, then it's going to lead to a breeding ground of confusion about how software is designed and how it actually functions.

The author's third recommendation is for U.S. policymakers to explore the ideas of protecting proof-of-work technologies like Bitcoin under the Second Amendment. An argument can be raised that efforts by some policymakers to ban Bitcoin is a violation of the Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. People have a right to physically secure what they freely choose to value in their informational lives. The intent of the Second Amendment should not change, but the scope of what is considered 'arms' should be expected to change. Citizens have a right to bear arms in whatever form those arms take, kinetic or electric, to physically secure their property. It shouldn't matter if the property, as well as the systems, use physical costs on attacks. Would take the form of computer systems.

The author's fourth recommendation is to recognize that proof-of-stake systems are not viable replacements for proof-of-work systems. Not recognizing this opens up windows to systematic exploitation and abuse. It also directly threatens national security and strategic security. Proof of stake is essentially a form of cyberback, a way for a singular organization with centralized administrative privileges to masquerade as a decentralized system and systematically exploit a weight voting reputation system. Stake is nothing more than an abstract name given to a zero-sum and inegalitarian administrative privilege that has already been assigned to an unknown group of anonymous users, probably those who awarded themselves the majority supply of ETH before the protocol was publicly launched several years before the protocol fork to proof of stake. To adapt the proof-of-stake system is to put oneself at the mercy of the users who control the stake, based on nothing more than blind faith that stake isn't already controlled by a single group of people who could easily exploit its reputation by dividing that stake across multiple addresses and masquerading as a decentralized group of people. The fact that proof-of-stake software developers, who in the case of Ethereum are non-U.S. citizens, openly admit to awarding themselves the majority supply of ETH before forking the protocol to proof of stake, claiming to be a decentralized system without proof, is more likely to be a fraud than it is to be an innovation. Because we know, based on first principles of computer theory, that it's physically impossible for an object-oriented software abstraction, like stake, to be verifiably decentralized in the first place. Stake doesn't physically exist, so it's incontestably true that it's physically impossible for the special administrative privileges with Ethereum developers arbitrarily named 'stake' to be verifiably decentralized. If there's no way for people to independently validate through shared objective physical reality, i.e., with their eyeballs, that the special administrative privileges of a given software system are decentralized, then the system can only be decentralized in name only. For a more detailed discussion, see section 5.10."

(this last quote is a curious one as it forms my speculation that NFTs with fixed supply and living community such as the Cypto Punks or Milady hold more value comparatively than gas tokens such as $ETH, which ironically launched on its network.)