Thread by @lndevs

PART 2: BITCOIN & MANEUVER WARFARE

Before going deeper into Bitcoin as a defensive technology, I'm going to introduce the relevant STYLE of warfare called Maneuver, as opposed to Attrition, which I believe bitcoin to be using to maximize its relative advantage over fiat

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The misunderstanding I went through previously, that of understanding warfare as between offense and defense, leads one to an inferior and counterproductive style of warfare called ATTRITION.

"the attritionist tends to gauge progress in quantitative terms: body counts, battle damage assessments, terrain captured." This tends to lead toward simplified numbers, centralized control, and inward focus on accumulating combat power.

Success in this style depends on "an overall superiority in attritional capacity. The greatest necessity for success is numerical and material superiority."

"Nations that perceived they were numerically & technologically superior have adopted war by attrition."

A classic and incredibly stupid rejoinder from someone who views warfare in this way is "How is your personal firearm or your Bitcoin going to protect you against the U.S. Military, THEY HAVE NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUKES!!!!!!"

(More on this in a bit)

Our theory of warfare as the interplay of initiative & response (NOT O/D) leads us to adopt a different style of warfare, known in the business as MANEUVER. To paraphrase @saylor: warfighting is about vectors, not scalars, and we need systems level math to fight effectively.

Warfare by maneuver "stems from a desire to circumvent a problem and attack it from a position of relative advantage rather than meet it straight on."

It doesn't matter to the maneuverist that he is outnumbered in aggregate. I'm NOT going to fight on your terms, I'm going to maneuver in order to selectively apply my greatest strengths against your greatest weakness, and systematically erode your will to fight.

"Success depends not so much on the efficient performance of procedures and techniques, but on understanding the specific characteristics of the enemy system." Now what do we know about the enemy system? Read @saifedean 's the Fiat Standard, but some relevant points:

The dollar is backed by the most powerful military in human history, to attempt to impose an alternate control structure against it is not only stupid, it's suicide. The Federal Reserve system has spent a hundred years preparing for and reinforcing against a direct attack.

IF THE ENEMY HAS BEEN SETTING UP HIS DEFENSE FOR 100 YEARS, DO NOT ENTER HIS ENGAGEMENT AREA. Instead, force him to jump out of his fighting hole and come attack YOUR defense position, on terms YOU define, where YOU have the relative advantage.

This is Bitcoin's maneuver, and why I believe it is the solution to fiat money printing. In order to attack the system, fiat has to pick up from its entrenched fighting positions, run across open terrain, and fight it in a manner it is intentionally optimized to defend.

Hayek wrote“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.”

THAT'S WHAT BITCOIN IS, IT IS THE ULTIMATE MANEUVER. The system CANNOT attack it on its own terms, it has to fight it on bitcoin's terms! And what are those terms?

1. You have to acquire milllions of SHA256 ASIC Miners.
This is bitcoin's engagement area. It makes enormous tradeoffs to minimize its attack surfaces, and force you to try to attrit it at the chain tip through acquiring hashrate and a fat stack of BTC.

ASICS are a FEATURE, NOT a BUG in this security model. By forcing the attacker to acquire millions of miners which HAVE NO OTHER USE besides bitcoin mining, we coopt them into supporting the network.

In the time they take to accumulate ASICs, their opportunity cost is NOT being paid to honestly mine. Every second of every day they plan to attack, they are presented with a profitable exit opportunity: just become a miner yourself, here's a fat stack.

If they elect NOT to become a miner themselves, they are simultaneously preparing to turn their billions of dollars of ASICs into paperweights. You need to spend billions to acquire them, then if you're successful, you end up with nothing and billions of lbs of junk.

In the SAME way that my ability to personally take my bitcoin to the grave if you shoot me in the head incentivizes you to negotiate with me instead of kill me, the necessity of acquiring ASICs yourself as an attacker incentivizes you to negotiate with Bitcoin the system.

2. Security Tradeoffs: Selecting your Engagement Area

When building a defense, you MUST select how to concentrate your forces. it is NOT possible to protect effectively from all sides. I shape this engagement area to draw the enemy into attacking me where I am strongest.

The greatest threats to a defense are unknown and unknowable attack vectors. ALWAYS better the devil you know, because when I am attacked in a way I didn't anticipate I have inherently lost the initiative.

Bitcoin's PoW model funnels its attackers into having to attack it at the chain tip. The PoW creates an objectively measurable, simplified defensive model, which is observable from all parties.

The fact that even people who don't know anything about bitcoin at all can tell me about the one and only way to attack it, a 51% attack, is yet another FEATURE not a BUG. I can PLAN to defend this, in fact I can intentionally funnel you into attacking me there!

with PoS protocols (especially ETH), the problem is that the additional base layer complexities introduce exponentially more attack vectors, literally new ones are found every couple weeks (check out @MartyBent 's Eth 2.0 updates for context)

I'm starting to go on a tangent here so gonna call it a day, but hopefully some people find this way of thinking interesting and this thread useful in understanding why a bunch of military guys like @JasonPLowery can see Bitcoin as fascinating from a military context.

End thread