Maybe Bitcoin isn’t really internet money. Maybe it’s a weapon for waging a new form of 21st-century cyber warfare. That’s what one major in the Space Force is arguing in a new MIT masters degree thesis that is causing a minor stir online in the wake of its publication last month. The 400-page tome snagged the top spot on Amazon’s list of best-selling technology books earlier this month and currently sits at #3. There’s no sign the Pentagon is acting on the idea, but the thesis offers the latest hint that as a new generation enters important American institutions, its members see crypto networks as useful tools instead of gimmicks. And if Jason Lowery’s “Softwar” is any indication, their thinking is getting more creative. The last time DFD brought you a Bitcoin proposal from Cambridge, Mass., was in November when a PhD student in Harvard’s economics department published a paper recommending that central banks stock up on the digital asset. While you might call that proposal avant-garde, it at least fits established ways of thinking about Bitcoin. By comparison, Lowery’s thesis is positively galaxy-brained. “Softwar” argues that the proof-of-work guessing game that underpins Bitcoin offers a less messy avenue for future power competition than nuclear war or swarms of killer robots. The metaphor Lowery employs, and uses for a cover image, is that of antlers. They may look silly, but they allow two stags to fight each other over territory without inflicting fatal damage. In the case of proof-of-work cyber-antlers, the victor in each round wins some network tokens and the right to publish the next block of transactions. Because proof-of-work depends on the ability to harness energy to generate computer guesses, power in the network would be widely distributed throughout physical space to disparate energy sources that are difficult to centrally control. In some ways, the role Lowery envisions for proof-of-work contests is similar to the one played by chess matches and the Olympics during the Cold War: a form of competition that falls short of a shooting war. Instead of gaining national prestige, the winner of proof-of-work competitions gains power within a distributed computer network that is being used to assign abstract property rights. The stakes of this contest would be higher if countries followed a related proposal from the thesis: to use Bitcoin as a cyber-security tool. That idea hearkens back to the pre-Bitcoin development of proof-of-work, when, in 1997, computer scientist Adam Back proposed “hashcash.” The idea was to thwart spammers by requiring email senders to solve a guessing problem that required a moderate amount of computer power — like an easier form of Bitcoin mining — to make it prohibitively costly to blast thousands of people with junk mail. Following Back, Lowery suggests that software systems can thwart certain kinds of attacks, like denial of service attacks — which overwhelm servers by flooding them with incoming requests — with Bitcoin. The idea is to design programs that only respond to external signals that are accompanied by sufficiently large transactions recorded on the Bitcoin network. If the network doubled as a cyber-security system, that would be all the more reason to compete for a share of control and to prevent adversaries from gaining special influence over it. Lowery, who does not lack for imaginative metaphors, also suggests that the Bitcoin network amounts to a cyber-equivalent to maritime trade routes — in other words, as a vector for economic exchange — and that there is a military imperative to protect freedom of navigation on the network. The thesis calls for the U.S. to stockpile Bitcoin, cultivate a domestic Bitcoin mining industry, and extend 2nd Amendment protections to the technology on the theory that it’s a weapon of self-defense. The proposal is certainly creative, but is it plausible? Military thinkers entertain all sorts of out-there ideas. Some, like splitting the nucleus of an atom, pan out. Others don’t. An Air Force spokesperson confirmed only Lowery’s rank, that he was a U.S. Air Force fellow at MIT, and that he is stationed at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida. Joan Rubin, executive director of MIT’s System Design and Management program, confirmed the thesis was submitted as part of Lowery’s graduate studies. Lowery himself did not respond to several interview requests. Beyond the imaginative and technical hurdles to this vision, there are political ones. Even if the Pentagon embraces Lowery’s view of the military value of Bitcoin, the U.S. faces countervailing national imperatives to curb carbon emissions and maintain the ability to impose sanctions through the dollar banking systems. On Twitter, Lowery has been outspoken, but vague, about impending government threats to Bitcoin. “Soon, powerful people within the US government will try to assert that supporting #Bitcoin is a threat to US National Security,” he said in one recent tweet, that appears to have been deleted. “I don't know how else I can be more explicitly clear with the public without getting in trouble,” he began a tweet on Tuesday that offered a similar warning. So, it seems that anyone who wants the U.S. government to grow a pair of cyber-antlers will first need to master other forms of non-lethal resource competition: argumentation and bureaucratic jockeying. | 
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