Thread by @JasonPLowery

#Bitcoin is an urgent US national strategic priority. Here's a thread which explains my reasoning (this is a very short summary of my research as an active-duty officer & US National Defense Fellow).

One of my favorite quotes in military history is by General Ferdinand Foch, who… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(2) But what if we are just as bad at seeing the bigger picture? What if there are new technologies around us today that we think about in the same vein? What if we are equally as guilty as General Foch was at failing to recognize how new technologies are about disrupt our… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(3) The big idea that I explored in my research at MIT was that this new technology we call "Bitcoin" isn't just a coin at all. Instead of being just a new form of money or a new type of financial payment system – I believe that Bitcoin could more accurately be described as a new… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(4) If you study nature, you’ll find practically all living creatures secure the resources they value – like food and territory – using some type of physical power. You’ll notice that nature’s top survivors are genetically optimized to project power for the purpose of physically… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(5) If you study human society, you’ll find that people behave exactly the same way. Practically every civilization uses physical power to secure their resources and their freedom of action in every domain.

To secure their access to land, people develop technology to project… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(6) So what happens if civilization expands its presence into a new domain called cyberspace? What would happen if society created a new kind of precious resources called data – or bits of information? How should society endeavor to keep their bits of information secure? How… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(7) It seems like there’s a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to cyber security. Right now, society uses physical power to keep their resources secure in every domain except for cyberspace. In land, sea, air, and space, people secure themselves using physical power.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(8) But for some reason, when it comes to securing our cyber resources like our data and or software, people are only trying to keep our cyber resources secure using nothing more than encoded logic. Instead of using physical power to secure their data and their freedom of action… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(9) Not surprisingly, it’s not working very well. The third-largest economy behind the US & China is the black-market digital economy of cybercrime. The US is so notoriously bad at securing our data and our software that we have a standing executive order on Improving the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(10) It turns out, there’s a group of people who have learned to secure their data and their software using physical power rather than relying exclusively on encoded logic. These people have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that logic alone isn’t the only way to secure cyber… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(11) How does it work? It’s actually really simple. All you have to do is reverse optimize a computer network to be physically expensive to operate, rather than being physically cheap to operate. Take for example, the Harvard Mark 1 computer shown here – the first operational… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(12) For the last 80 years, engineers have been trying to minimize the size and energy consumption of our computers. As a result, computers today are microscopically small and only need to use tiny amounts of energy to make computations and pass bits of information around… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(13) But what if you wanted to figure to physically constrain and impose physically prohibitive costs on people in, from, and through cyberspace for the purpose of improving cyber security? Then you would have to build some kind of reverse-optimized computer network that is as… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(14) To the untrained eye, these bits would look the same as any other bits. But if you were to pay attention to what’s happening under the hood, at the hardware layer at the BOTTOM of the tech stack, you’ll notice that these are reverse-optimized bits of information. They… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(15) It happens to be the case that the first widely-adopted use case for a protocol that creates physically secured and reverse-optimized bits of information is for peer-to-peer electronic cash. But it should be noted that physically secured bits of information could represent… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(16) I believe that Proof-of-work represents the missing piece of this puzzle because it enables people to use physical power to secure their cyber resources. Bitcoin represents a bunch of people across the internet who have voluntarily adopted an open-source protocol that allows… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(17) But it doesn’t stop there... here's where things really start to blow one's mind.

If you go back and look at how civilization determines who gets control over the precious resources from other domains, you’ll note that people choose to engage in a global-scale physical… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(18) This is exactly how Bitcoin works. People who use bitcoin compete for control over the ability to pass those bits of information across the internet by engaging in a global-scale physical competition. And as a complex emergent effect of that physical power competition,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(19) This would imply that Bitcoin isn’t just a monetary protocol, but could instead be something much, much more disruptive. For the first time, society appears to have learned how to project power in, from, and through cyberspace using physical power. Society is using that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(20) Sounds crazy, right? Bitcoin is an interesting toy, but surely of not military value whatsoever, right? Before the doubters in the audience go all Ferdinand Foch on me, let me remind you that black powder was invented by Chinese alchemists who were trying to make medicine.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(21) So what do we do. Ban it? Hell no. We become the best at it. This is now a race for the future of cyberspace.

In his famous speech at Rice University, President Kennedy noted that “The exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not… and no nation which… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(22) It also scares me that our biggest rivals like Russia & China have recently pivoted and become global leaders in this technology. I think they've figured it out, and I'm worried that we're going to fall behind.

(23) In other words, the West can't afford to "Foch" this up like we did with Airplanes. We had the luxury of about 20 years to figure out that General Foch was completely wrong and that airplanes have extraordinary military value -- that technology completely transformed the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

(24) P.S. If I'm right then #Bitcoin is also the most powerful and most efficient power projection technology that humans have ever invented to secure their resources, and it's also completely non-lethal, thus ushering in a new era of peace & prosperity.

(25) If you want to learn more, my research will be publicaly available via MIT. If you would like a physically printed copy, you can get it off Amazon here:
a.co/d/ezyEAI9

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For your consideration.