WBD660 Audio Transcription

Is Bitcoin Warfare? With Jason Lowery

Release date: Friday 19th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jason Lowery. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Jason Lowery is a Major in the US Space Force and the author of Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin. In this interview, we discuss how he is building the case within the US Department of Defence that Bitcoin represents a new form of digital warfare that the US government needs to embrace to secure its power projection in cyberspace.

“We had irrigated land, we had army. We had goods travelling across the sea, we had navy. We had goods travelling across the air, we had air force… So what happens when civilization expands its footprint into cyberspace? How do we secure zero trust permissionless access to our data in cyberspace?”

— Jason Lowery

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Jason, how are you? 

Jason Lowery: I'm good, how are you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, good, good man.  A lot of people have been asking me to do this interview with you for quite some time, and I knew we had to do it in person.  And we met previously in Boston, what was it, about a year-and-a-half ago? 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, it was the end of 2021.  It was like two days after I got on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Wow, yes, it was.  But it started out as a LinkedIn post, right, all of this?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, I've been posting about Bitcoin on LinkedIn for a while and one day, I couldn't update my LinkedIn because it just wouldn't load, and I found out that it was because so many people were logging in to check.  And then I found out that I was going viral on Twitter.  And then Greg Foss eventually DMed me and was like, dude, you have to come over to Twitter because people are talking about you and everything that you've been saying.  I was like, there's some shitcoiner on LinkedIn that I was just telling off.  So I was like, I don't know if I want to go to Twitter, that's a jungle!  He convinced me, and day one on Twitter was trial by fire, I was just baptised in fire on day one.  We met two days after that.

Peter McCormack: I didn't realise it was that close.  So, we had that dinner in Boston with Greg Foss, but yeah, I mean look, Twitter, I don't think people realise how hard Twitter can be when you first go on and you get a lot of attention.  I mean, I didn't get it like you did, but there are times you get a lot of attention.  It's a hard thing to know how to deal with and you kind of learn by making mistakes.

Jason Lowery: Yeah.  The first, I want to say, 10 hours, I had 10,000 followers.  It was so fast that people were convinced that it was a government attack, that there's no possible way some rando can have 10,000 followers on day one; this must be some government thing.  And so instantly, right out of the gate, if I just looked at my tags -- and I didn't even know how to turn that off, turn those notifications off.  So I just get on and I just see nothing but hate.  I was like, "Yeah, I don't know if I'm cut out for Twitter.  I don't think they're going to like the government guy here". 

Peter McCormack: The spook! 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, the spook!  And so, that was right after we met.  The next day, there was AI memes of us, CIA in the background.  They were hilarious, but it was an interesting experience that first week on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: All right, well look, I think it's been an interesting experience.  I mean, I followed you, and as somebody who's got in fights, I've seen you fighting and blocking, and people not liking what you're saying, and we'll get into that, there's a lot to cover.  But I do want to cover what we talked about at dinner first, I mentioned that before we started.  That was really fascinating to me.  I just kind of just sat there listening to you talk about that.  Was that what you studied at MIT? 

Jason Lowery: So when I was at MIT, I was part of their system design and management program, which is just systems engineering.  It's a field of engineering that kind of encompasses every subset of engineering.  It's really popular for higher-level middle managers in engineering positions, because I already have a graduate degree, I'm an astronautical engineer by trade, so the Space Force sent me to MIT to learn systems engineering.  And so, what's cool about that is I can study systems, which incorporates everything from biology to anything that you can think of that can be framed as a system.  And the way MIT does it is you take a core curriculum, and then you kind of branch out and you study whatever you need to study to get after your technology that you're writing about.

So I could just do anything, pretty much.  I chose Bitcoin, which is what I chose at the very beginning. I could dive into any field of science I needed to, to build the grounded theory from first principles up.  So, I ended up learning a lot about anthropology, biology, psychology.  As you know, the Bitcoin rabbit hole can go into a lot of different areas of research and science, and so I ended up just kind of dabbling in everything.

Peter McCormack: Well, you can also take it where you want, that's one of the interesting things about Bitcoin, because it's this emergent thing.  If you've got an idea or a thesis, you can take it wherever you want.  I mean, that's what I was chatting to Danny about last night and this morning when we were prepping for this interview, because me and Danny went back and forth with each other a little bit about this.  And what I was saying is, essentially what you're doing is another thesis, to be proven right or wrong.  Yes, you're behind it, you fully support it, but that's the great thing about Bitcoin.  You can come up with a thesis and take that thesis for a ride and see where it takes you.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, and you see so many different people with so many different backgrounds taking their expertise to this technology and giving everyone a new perspective.  So me, the military guy, the Space Force astronautical engineer, whose job it is to design weapon systems to fight in a new domain, I see Bitcoin and I'm like, "Okay, I've got some thoughts about this.  Maybe those thoughts could be useful".  And so, yeah, I think Bitcoin can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I tried to just make the case that it could be something even more than money if you zoomed out a little bit. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.  When we get into it, there's going to be stuff that I agree with you, stuff I disagree with you, but I think it's all going to come back to the same place where I think the kind of output at the end, I think we'll have a lot of agreement.  Can we cover the biology stuff?

Jason Lowery: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember what you talked to me about that night? 

Jason Lowery: I remember not really well because I remember you and Greg Foss were buying a lot of rounds that night!

Peter McCormack: We drunk a lot of wine!

Jason Lowery: And I remember the restaurant being really pissed at us because we held them for an hour or something.  They were so pissed!

Peter McCormack: Dude, they got paid!

Jason Lowery: Yeah, yeah, I know!  But I remember we were eating steak, wasn't I talking about hunting? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you went into organisms.  You went into the evolution of organisms and how they then became territorial.  I can't remember exactly everything, I just remember calling Danny and saying, "Look, I don't know about this Jason guy, but he's fucking interesting!"

Jason Lowery: Thanks.  Yeah, okay, so that ended up blossoming into what we now have as chapter three of the software thesis.  So the way I open up, so the thesis or the book is called Softwar.  So, I frame Bitcoin as the evolution of warfare into a new domain or just a new paradigm of war fighting, a physical conflict between human beings. 

But to grease the skids for that conversation, I don't frame it as a human thing, I frame it as an evolutionary scale thing, and I basically try to explain the phenomenon we call warfare through what we can empirically observe in nature.  That way, no one can disagree with me, because you can look outside and validate for yourself, this is how nature works.  If I can build the case that animals fight each other for territory, for control over resources, for ownership over resources, you can't really argue with that.  And then I can now create this base layer understanding of how property ownership works and how security works, and we can say, "Okay, now humans just do the same thing animals do". 

So that conversation, if I remember correctly, was me telling you about, if you look at the animal kingdom, if you look at nature, if you go back all the way to 4 billion years ago and you study how nature claims ownership of things, you'll note that there is a very, very strong link between ownership of property and projecting power or fighting other animals for ownership of that property or for control over that property, or that resource of any kind.  So starting with single-celled bacteria, you've got nutrient-rich volumes of water around thermo-hydro vents, a lot of resources in those. 

How do you make sure that you have control over that volume of space that has all the resources you need?  Well, it's a bloodbath.  It's a gigantic fight between all kinds of single-celled organisms constantly battling each other for control over that resource.  And, you can frame every major or many major evolutions as improvements in this power projection/fighting game of organisms competing against each other, projecting power against each other to secure their access to some underlying resource. 

So, 2 billion years ago, single-celled organisms figured out how to cooperate together.  Once they figured out how to cooperate with each other, the cooperating organisms were able to wreak havoc on all the single-celled organisms, capture more territory, capture more resources.  And then that blossoms over this 2 billion years following evolution of all sorts of animals with all sorts of power projection capabilities.  They started growing eyeballs so they could target their prey; they started growing teeth; they started growing fangs; they started growing pointy claws; they started getting bigger, stronger, all for the sake of making sure they could achieve and preserve control over the resources they value, not by engaging in diplomacy or shaking hands or coming to some agreement because they didn't understand how to do that, by fighting over it, by imposing a severe physical cost or some prohibitive physical cost on my competitor from having access to the resources that I need. 

The world became a very competitive, congested, contested, hostile environment over limited resources.  And the way animals achieve control over those limited resources is by engaging in this global scale, physical power competition, which we call outside, just nature.  If you go out and you look outside, it's brutal.  Nature's metal.  They have established what it takes to succeed and survive in a zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian way.  Zebras and lions don't trust each other, they're not asking each other for permission; they're projecting power; they're taking their territory; they're defending their territory with power.

Peter McCormack: And so, projection of power and conflict, is that an intrinsic part of evolution in that there is a need to consume, to reproduce?

Jason Lowery: It seems so.  It would seem that the universe isn't really welcoming to life, you have very scarce limited resources on Earth, at least in the cosmic scale, and so it seems a key part to live for all nature is to compete against each other for access to these underlying scarce resources.  And what we see in nature is what has survived this rigorous natural selection bloodbath for billions of years.  And so we look outside and we see a falcon.  That thing has survived a long and brutal process to remain a falcon and to continue spreading its genes.  And an interesting complex emergent effect of this evolutionary process where life gets increasingly better at competing against each other is that life also gets increasingly better at surviving the hostile nature of the universe. 

In the book, Softwar, I talk about the ecological arms race between what became mammals and what became birds.  You had these warm-blooded, endothermic creatures that popped up a couple of hundred million years ago and they learned, because they could metabolise their own food and go underground, I think we talked about this, they learned how to basically go underground and heat themselves and eat stuff underground so they could avoid the terrestrial layer of predators and dinosaurs that would eat them.  Well, if this major group of what became, they're weasel-looking things, if they go underground, then what about all the dinosaurs that hunt those?  Oh crap, now your major food source is out.  So you have to now be endothermic, you have to learn how to be warm-blooded so that you can continue to hunt your prey who's warm-blooded. 

So you'll see this in nature happen a lot over time, is you get into these evolutionary races, "Okay, you've got warm blood, I've got warm blood; you've got eyeballs, I've got to have eyeballs, you've got camouflage, I've got to have camouflage; you've got scales, I need to have them".  And in this ecological arms race that happened between the shrew-like things and the reptile-like things that were their main predator, you blossom into mammals and birds, which they're faster, they were smarter, they were more manoeuvrable, and they were warm-blooded.  And you're like, okay, what's the big deal?  Well, that becomes a huge advantage when the meteor hits and wipes out 80% or more of life on Earth. 

These animals that were trapped in this ecological arm race that were trying to out-compete each other, the prey and the predators, they were the ones that were most capable of surviving that chaos.  When the sun goes out, suddenly you don't have a way to heat your body anymore.  So endothermia is actually a really good advantage.  If you can metabolise your own food and warm your blood, you don't need the sunlight to do it, that's super-good when there's so much debris in the atmosphere when the meteor hits that the sun is blotted out from the sky for two years.  So most things freeze to death, starve to death, but these things we now call birds and mammals survive.  And you see that over and over and over again. 

In the book, I also talk about when photosynthesis first evolved.  They figured out how to basically eat light and poop out oxygen, these single-celled bacteria.  Well, oxygen is highly flammable.  So, an easy way to tell if there's life on an exoplanet is to look for oxygen or to look for fire.  There's not enough oxygen on planets to catch fire, except for Earth, where there's so many living biological organisms that are pooping oxygen, that there's so much oxygen.  But 2 billion years ago, this new evolutionary process, where people can do photosynthesis or cells can do photosynthesis and poop out oxygen, means you basically cover the entire planet with super-flammable gas and it set the whole planet on fire.

So, one of the first major extinction events of life on Earth was the great oxidation event, where basically life was just this burning soup in the oceans.  Okay, well how do you escape that?  How do you overcome that chaos?  Well, it is believed that multicellular cooperation, or in this case basically cells learning to grow tendrils and capture other cells and then form this symbiotic multicellular thing that could then harden their cellular wall so that you can survive against fire, it is believed that that's how we, or that's how life overcame the great oxidation event, all this napalm that's burning everyone and killing everyone is multicellular cooperation.  The point of all this is that these evolutions, over the time span of life, they help us not only project power against each other, control resources, control territory, but also to countervail the chaos of the universe, otherwise known as entropy.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and so when you talk about the projection of force, can that be offensive and defensive, because force feels offensive, right?  We talk about force, it feels like an aggressive action. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so especially in the Space Force, where it's hard to distinguish between what constitutes offense and what constitutes defence, because say for example, China launches a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile into orbit around the Moon, into a parking orbit around the Moon, is that an offensive action or a defensive action?  Okay, so say we don't like it up at the Moon and we shoot it down.  So, we launch our own ASAT thing to go into cislunar orbit to blow up that nuclear-tipped thing in a parking orbit around the Moon; is that offensive; is that defensive? 

Peter McCormack: I see what you're saying because you can argue that launching this nuclear-tipped missile around the Moon is a defensive action. 

Jason Lowery: That's what China will say.

Peter McCormack: But to me it feels an offensive action because it's putting something out there aggressively.

Jason Lowery: So what was Putin's justification for invading Ukraine; do you call it offense or defence? 

Peter McCormack: Well, it depends on who you speak to and what their interpretation is of that.  I've read a lot of the different interpretations.  I think it's an offensive move. 

Jason Lowery: So the point is, the difference between offense and defence is the ideology of the observer; there's no real technical difference. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's relative to the observer.

Jason Lowery: So, from you know the engineer technical guy, at least in the…  So, the United States borrows most of its military doctrine from when Napoleon kicked a bunch of ass in Europe, because that was when we were still a fledgling nation trying to grow.  The French were dominant in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, so we borrow a lot of our military doctrine, so-called modern military doctrine, from the French, early 1800s French.  And in that world, the thing that made France revolutionary was their new paradigm of not offense and defence strictly, but what we now call manoeuvre warfare. 

So Napoleon was like, "Stop focusing too much on building defences or building good offense, focus your military, if you want to dominate, on manoeuvrability.  And your role is to manoeuvre your military to where it has the best advantage".  So, you want to move your military so that it can take the fight it's guaranteed to win.  And whether that's "offense or defence", whatever that looks like, doesn't really matter; it's, "Position your military to take the fight that you know you can win".  And depending on the technology at the time, the pendulum swings.  Sometimes the offensive has the advantage, sometimes the so-called defensive has the advantage. 

Then also, people get confused or make distinctions between passive power projection and active power projection.  So a good example of passive power projection is colonisation.  This dates back 2 billion years.  If you've got precious territory and you're a bunch of single-celled organisms and you just capture that territory, just focusing on yourself, okay, you've colonised that territory.  What happens if anyone else wants that territory?  You colonised it, so you got there first, but does that mean that -- so if you fight off people that get there after you, are you defending; are you offending?  It gets to the point where you always have to ask this question, "How did you come to own the land you're defending?"  And you zoom back, you probably took it by force.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, not always.  I mean, if you're talking at a nation state level, yes.  But if you're talking on an individual level, the land I own, I bought from somebody who sold it to me.  But if you go back to the history of time, there will have probably been a time that it was taken from somebody, perhaps.

Jason Lowery: There was a time where that this plot of land wherever you live, belonged to animals and nature, and then humans came in and said, "This is mine now".  And then, there's a series of fights over thousands of years, and now you're saying this is yours now, "This is mine now".  But you trace that back in basically all cases, humans took it from something or somebody.  If you took it from the nature, no one really cares, but if you took it from another human, then people will have beef against that, they'll be mad about that for some reason. 

I always try to just avoid the discussion of making a distinction between offense and defence and just focus on either active or passive power projection.  So another example of passive power projection is a wall or a barbed wire fence, okay.  A barbed wire fence will harm anyone who tries to cross it.  If you just set up a beachhead somewhere and just pull your ships up and just cordon everything off and put up a bunch of barbed wire fence, that's a power projection play.  And if you grow and you steadily branch out and you're just continuing to build walls and walls, you are invading a country, but you're doing it passively.  You're not shooting a bullet or swinging a blade perhaps, but you're still projecting power.  It hurts to punch a wall. 

So there's active power projection and passive power projection.  There's swinging the blade and actually cutting somebody, or there's phalanx formation, shields only, but then going in and invading or taking over, taking that territory.

Peter McCormack: So a wall around my house is a passive power projection?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, or a cellular membrane that cells figured out how to do 4 billion years ago.  You are passively capturing the volume of space with force. 

Peter McCormack: I still don't see the force element.  If I buy a plot of land, it may have historically been taken through force at a previous point, but if I bought this from another owner, rightfully, legally, and I put up a wall, I still don't understand how that's a passive projection of power.

Jason Lowery: There's the physical part and there's the part where the people you bought it from were tied to some military that captured that land.  So if you just literally put up a wall, or if I just block the door -- so in America, if you block someone's exit, that is either assault or battery.  I think it's assault, qualifies as assault.  You block someone's path, that is assault.  You just sit there and you don't move and you can't get around them, or you block a port, that is a force projection thing.  It's passive though.  Every action has an equal opposite reaction.  You're not actually applying any force until you get hit by someone or someone swings something at you.  But if you punch a wall, that will hurt you.  There is force in that.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but why would someone walk up to my house and punch the wall?  If they do, that's on them.  I still don't see – I can see how you can make the claim of land that's been taken historically at some war at some point.  But once we've evolved to a point and a nation has been established, at some point, land will have passed through multiple people legally and through the structures of the courts and willing participants in the trade; again, not to be difficult --

Jason Lowery: No, this is good.

Peter McCormack: -- but I still don't see how that's a projection. 

Jason Lowery: Let's say you're Native Americans living in Florida and one day you go check out this place that you and your ancestors have been visiting for multiple generations.  And this a-hole, Admiral Columbus, has landed on the beach and built a fortress, okay, that's why you would want to go punch the wall.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's a different scenario.  I'm trying to compare like for like.  In that scenario, yes, because he's the invader, he's taking the land through force and he's putting up a wall to a land that's previously theirs.  But nobody has a claim to this land now.  It is known in my country that piece of land is owned by John, John sold it to me and that's now Peter's.  So why is my wall, in that scenario, force?

Jason Lowery: That piece of land belongs to the -- or at least, let's use America.  My piece of land belongs to America and then I lease it from America and I pay a tax or a fee and that fee goes to people like me who will project a lot of power against anyone who tries to take that plot of land from America. 

Peter McCormack: So you're basically saying you cannot have a scenario where there is no projection of force?

Jason Lowery: Look outside, look at nature, let's start there; look at nature.  How do animals define what's owned?  There's a piece of steak on the ground, a fresh kill on the savanna. 

Peter McCormack: They take it!

Jason Lowery: Okay, wolf come, or let's say a wolf takes down a rabbit or something, okay, and I go up and I'm like, "That looks good", and I try to take it from the wolf.  What is the wolf going to do?

Peter McCormack: It's going to fight you.

Jason Lowery: It's going to snarl, it's going to make mean scary sounding noises, so it is projecting its capability to impose a severe, physically, prohibitive cost on me.  It is projecting power against me.  So that is how it signals that that piece of meat belongs to that wolf. 

Peter McCormack: Okay. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, but here we go.  What if I snarl back?  I believe that meat belongs to me, so I snarl back at the wolf.

Peter McCormack: You're projecting power back.

Jason Lowery: Who owns that piece of meat?

Peter McCormack: I actually think in that scenario, neither owns it.  At that moment, one wolf's got it, and the other one wants it.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, okay, so there's a property dispute.  How do we adjudicate or settle that property dispute? 

Peter McCormack: Well, you either fight...  Well, you do the dance of snarling first and see if that scares off and if it doesn't, then you start throwing fists. 

Jason Lowery: So, whenever there's a property dispute, a wolf isn't capable of -- it isn't physiologically capable, it doesn't have the brain power to try to negotiate with me or engage in some diplomacy to come to some agreement over this thing.  Most animals can't do that.  That is a uniquely human thing.  So, how animals handle who owns what and what their pecking order is, so if you have a pack of wolf, who gets the first drink of the water or who gets the first bite, okay, they establish pecking order by fighting each other all the time.  And then you do it interspecies and intraspecies, so between wolves and wolves talking to other humans, who are competing simultaneously over a piece of property or resource.  So that's how it's done in nature.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's fine.  And we are essentially animals?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, I would say so.  So that question is, what makes human beings different than animals?

Peter McCormack: I just think it's consciousness, like self-aware.

Jason Lowery: Exactly.  That's pretty much just it. 

Peter McCormack: And therefore, we have a higher level of intelligence, so we do have diplomacy. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so if we trace it back and you go back to between 50,000 years ago and, I don't know, 300,000 years ago, it's not really clear how old humans are, anatomically modern humans.  But what makes humans unique from other animals, we've got big-ass prefrontal cortexes; we can cook our food; we are far more intelligent; we have far more theory of mind, self-consciousness; we have far more higher orders of intentionality.  So we can think of and predict the intentions of other brains, other animals, other people.  So that's what really makes – we're still animals, obviously; we're still mammals, obviously; we're still in the same plane in the domain as nature, obviously.  The difference is we can think of things. 

If I come across you and we want to have a competition, or maybe you live on some plot of land and for whatever reason I believe that belongs to me, or whatever the underlying resource is, we have the physiological capability to try to come to a mutual agreement.  Okay, let's split the land or it's going to belong to me because I was here first.  Okay, handshake.  But when we come into that agreement, when we settle the dispute that way, we've adopted a trust-based system.  I must trust that you will uphold, my counterparty will uphold their end of the agreement.  I am requiring you to permit me to have access to this thing or to call it mine.  And all you have to do is just break that trust or not be sympathetic to our belief system and our agreement, this is Ukraine, that's not Ukraine, and then suddenly it breaks down. 

So, humans are unique in that we try our best to avoid that fight, but there's obviously always exceptions.  Just read history.  Not everyone can come to agreement on everything.  There's going to be discrepancies in belief systems or ideologies, but worst of all, the main problem is, if you only try to agree to a common belief system, you create an asymmetric advantage for the person to just take your thing.  So what I mean is, this is physical security 101.  Let's say we want to compete over this water bottle.  We come to an agreement, we shake hands, we sign a thing, we take pictures.  And now this water bottle becomes worth a gazillion dollars.  The agreement hasn't changed.  I have no capacity to physically constrain you or physically harm you or impose any physically prohibitive costs.  I'm not going to snarl at you.  Why not just take the thing?  There's a certain dollar point where this could become so valuable that you will break that agreement.  There's a huge advantage, a benefit-to-cost ratio of just taking the thing. 

Another good example is you put a million dollars in a truck bed and park it in Times Square with no one around.  Just dump it in the middle of Times Square; "That's mine, no one take it".  Would you feel bad if someone took that stuff, or would you think I'm just being stupid? 

Peter McCormack: I mean, I think you've put a test out there, but I think you're being stupid, and I expect some people to take it.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so if you learn irrigation and you create this freshly irrigated plot of land, then how do you defend that thing?  Yeah, we can shake hands, we can pull a Munich Agreement and say, "Look, we came to an agreement here, we're fine".  But how hungry are you; how valuable is that land?  If I do not impose a cost, or if I do not posture myself to impose a cost on you if you try to take that thing, then we're relying exclusively on trust.  I just must necessarily trust you.  So it's a trust-based system, trust is systemically insecure, you will take that thing if it's valuable enough, and there is no cost for you to do so.

Peter McCormack: Not necessarily.  Some people just wouldn't.  Not everyone would just take just because they could. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, that's fair. 

Peter McCormack: That's another thing we innately have as humans that I don't think animals have.  They see the meat, they want the meat, they'll take the meat.  But we have a moral code that maybe some of us observe differently.  Danny would probably take the money, I wouldn't.

Danny Knowles: Right.  But there's also, in our society, there's recourse if you take something that's not yours.  So does that not change the behavioural pattern of it?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, that recourse is, I'll throw you in prison, I'll impose a physically prohibitive cost on you.  And this thing that we call enforcement is people introducing force, projecting power, introducing force into the equation to tilt the balance, basically to make the return on investment of attacking me or taking my thing not so good.  This is also fundamental to deterrence.  For example, there's nothing stopping another nuclear power from launching missiles and doing a first strike against, for example, the United States.  If they wanted to, they could probably pull that off, just physically.  They launch 100 missiles, each one with 5 warheads on each missile.  Our missile defence systems are designed to counter little threats like North Korea, not a Russian-Chinese coordinated nuclear attack on the United States, okay? 

So what do we do, right?  If we've got silos everywhere, we've got runways, they could just blow up the silos and runways where our nukes are if they strike first, so what do we do?  Well, that's why we have submarines.  That's the whole, entire purpose of nuclear submarines, US nuclear submarines.  Now, we're negotiating with Australia on that.  The whole point of that is you park a submarine underwater and then those things wait.  And if anyone tries to strike us first and they take out our missile silos and they take out our runways, we can't stop that, but we can shoot back.  We can have second strike.

Peter McCormack: So it's that deterrence understanding that if you shoot, you're going to get shot back?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, deterrence is.  And one of the most effective forms of security is if you hold a knife to my throat, I'll hold one back, and so, don't do it.  Like, you want to make the benefit-to-cost ratio of attacking you as low as possible, and you do that by saying that we are very willing and capable to strike back.  And that's why, at least for nuclear wars, for nuclear deterrence, we use submarines, they're key to that.  But it applies to everything.  The wolf snarling at you is trying to deter you, "If you try to take this thing, I will bite you".  That is how security works in nature and it also is how security works in human civilisation, because you may be trustworthy and because you're so trustworthy and you've demonstrated that and we have such a history of this then, "Yeah, okay, I'll come to agreement with you and we'll just agree and I'll trust you, but there's a lot more than just you that I have to worry about".  This world is filled with a lot of predators and human beings are the peak predator.

Peter McCormack: So interestingly, I never knew that about submarines.

Danny Knowles: No, I'd never heard it, but it makes total sense thought.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I just thought submarines were just another part of the Navy, hidden, able to take out ships. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, the big ones, those big ones, the black ones that have nuclear missiles on them, Trident nuclear missiles, they exist to shoot back if that ever happened. 

Peter McCormack: What is the role of tactical nuclear weapons, which I've heard about then? They've talked, with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, that there's a risk that Russia might use a tactical nuclear weapon, which to me implies it's a much smaller nuclear weapon, not as widespread damage, but still can cause a lot of damage in a small area.  Is that almost like, "We can use this one, it doesn't start World War III"? 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, and if you look back in the 1960s, they were nuclear bazookas, like human launched, just over the shoulder, nuke on the end.  You can make them small.  The advantage of nukes is they're a highly efficient form of power projection.  So, this gets back to the evolution.  So, animals evolve increasingly more powerful ways to project power, so they get stronger basically and bigger, so you can pack more punch literally, or they get more efficient at power projection.  So they get pointy teeth.  So for the same amount of force, you can puncture and cause a lot more damage to the skin if you have pointy teeth than if you have blunt teeth; they're just very efficient.  They come up with all sorts of clever ways to play this game. 

Well, humans do the same thing, humans are very resourceful.  We figured out how to wield fire.  That's a very efficient power projection technique because we don't have to burn our own watts, our own food, to cause that damage.  We use an exogenous supply.  So if we got a problem with these predators in the jungle, we just burn down the jungle.  In terms of the amount of power that we're using and producing ourselves, it's an extremely efficient power projection technique.  Swinging blades back in the old days, those are increasingly more powerful, increasingly more efficient power projection techniques.  Trebuchets, catapults, you go through time, we discover gunpowder, that's a super-efficient way of projecting power, a lot of power.  You get cannons, you get everyone just -- it doesn't matter how big you are, if I got a pistol, your skull is just as vulnerable to a bullet as my skull, no matter how big your muscles are.  I've got a very efficient and increasingly more powerful way of defending my property or engaging in this natural process that is the chaos and war of all animals.  Nukes represents basically the end of the line.  We've got so efficient in terms of size, weight, and power required to project that much power.  I don't know if you've ever seen an actual nuke.

Peter McCormack: I've seen one of the missiles?

Jason Lowery: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I can't think that I have.  I mean, I've seen them on TV and in films.

Jason Lowery: And have you seen how big they are compared to them? 

Peter McCormack: I don't know.

Jason Lowery: On this table, we could fit multiple nukes to destroy multiple cities. 

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay.

Jason Lowery: So, they're small, you can pack a lot of punch.  So, in terms of power projection technology in this game of security, physical security, of imposing costs on people because you can't trust them or you don't want to, humans have become so efficient at power projection technology that ironically they're too inefficient to use.  That's the issue, is you actually cause too much damage.  The whole point of settling this property dispute is to win, one side wins.  If we kill each other in the process, that's an ineffective power projection technology. 

Peter McCormack: But there's a significant argument, and it's one I really hate even trying to have an opinion on, but there's a really strong argument that Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended World War II, and I've seen people make the argument that it saved lives because it ended the war.  It brought Japan to the table to end the war and if they hadn't, the war could have carried on and you could have seen millions more dead.  How many died; was it 200,000 in each city or something? 

Jason Lowery: I think the first one was 80,000. 

Peter McCormack: But either way, I mean hugely devastating, horrific, but the argument was it brought Japan to the table to...   Actually, at Pearl Harbour, I've actually been on the ship where they signed the peace, the surrender. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah?  How many people died in the fire-bombing of Tokyo right before Hiroshima?  No one knows. 

Peter McCormack: Do you know? 

Jason Lowery: I don't remember, but it's comparable; it's like 100,000.  It's on the same order of nuclear.  So, during World War II --

Danny Knowles: It's more; it's 300,000.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so substantially more people died from traditional weapons than the bombing, but no one talks about the traditional bombings that we're doing.

Danny Knowles: And injured another 400,000.

Jason Lowery: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I just think because it feels so horrific and scary, and it was just massive, widespread damage, destruction and death.

Jason Lowery: If you're in Tokyo and you've already seen just hundreds of bombers come and fire-bombing this thing, and then one day, one plane, one bomb does that much damage…

Peter McCormack: I mean, you know the game's over.

Jason Lowery: It's done.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: So after Hiroshima, we started bombing them with leaflets saying, "Look what we just did to you.  Convince your Emperor to do an honourable surrender, it would be honourable for you, because we have built this thing, and we'll just keep building them until you surrender".  And so, two months after the first Trinity test, not the first Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the war is suddenly over.  We've been carpet-bombing Tokyo, we've been doing all this stuff, 300,000 people dying on a single night.  They weren't surrendering, but one bomb, 80,000 people, okay.  They've clearly got something that we've never seen before, and I'm super-excited about actually Oppenheimer coming out in a month or two.  So they're going to explore this.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen the trailer for this?

Danny Knowles: No, I've not heard of it.

Peter McCormack: We'll watch it afterwards.  Yeah, I mean, I wonder if Japan had invented the nuclear bomb first, how the course of history might have changed.

Jason Lowery: What if Germany, who was also trying to build, who already had V-2 rockets, so they were just V-2ing the crap out of the UK, so they could already deliver these warheads really effectively with rockets, what became intercontinental ballistic missiles, was all Germany.  They already had jets, a good five, ten years before we had jets.  When we were flying around in our P-51s or in your case, the Spitfires, thinking we're bad-asses, they're flying around in Messerschmitt 262s, operational Messerschmitt 262s, jet aircraft, and they were racing towards it and the estimate is we were about 18 months ahead of them in getting the bomb. 

Peter McCormack: Did the US have Germans working on their nuclear program?  I kind of feel I knew that. 

Jason Lowery: Well, we had basically scientists from all around the world, to include Germany in Los Alamos.  We created a city and said, "We have to build this thing as fast as possible", but this illustrates, again, Schelling points.  If a new power projection technology emerges that tips the scales in this game that we play, then that becomes a Schelling point.  If you want to continue being able to secure your resources, you have to be able to fight back in an effective way. 

If you're a blind organism and I just evolved eyeballs, now I have a targeting system.  How's a blind organism going to do against a predator with eyeballs?  You've got to get eyeballs too.  And until you get eyeballs, you cannot expect to survive effectively.  And so once again, the ecological arms race or the human arms race, everything, we're constantly evolving new technologies.  That's how humans do it, we don't actually evolve, but we create new technologies, which is an evolution of itself.  And so you have no option. 

I talk in Softwar about how in 1939, Einstein sends the note to the President and says, "Hey, we think we can build a bomb".  What people don't talk about is six years before that, Einstein also declared that in his lifetime, he wouldn't expect nuclear energy to be possible.  And he also spent all those years openly condemning, you know, he was a super-famous pacifist, "War is not the answer, we can't do war".  And so when he goes to the President in 1939 and says, "We can build it and we should", that was a huge pivot, okay.  So the people at the time knew, "If you don't build this thing, they will". 

Peter McCormack: Yes. 

Jason Lowery: And so, that becomes the key point.  A key point in Softwar is, you have to be on par with your predators because you're in a competitive, congested, contested, hostile environment.  If they're building it, you've got to build it.  That's why we have a Space Force now.  If they're building it, we've got to build it. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just tell me about the Space Force stuff as well.  Look, I know you've told me about it before, but just for the listeners, because it just sounds fucking cool, wild but cool, to be involved in working on this.

Jason Lowery: Let's go back 10,000 years.  We've already talked about freshly irrigated land.  Let's go back even longer.  I have no idea how old bees are, but they're probably millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years old.  Bees produce honey.  This is a resource that everybody loves.  I don't know if you love honey.

Peter McCormack: I love honey. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, so how do you prevent people from attacking your honey? 

Peter McCormack: You get a sting. 

Jason Lowery: You get a stinger, isn't that interesting? 

Peter McCormack: You get a little weapon. 

Jason Lowery: You get a little weapon out your ass.  And if anyone tries to take the hive's honey, you sink that thing into their skin.  You do it so deep that if you try to leave, you'll disembowel yourself and die.  So honey bees die every time they've seen something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they're like suicide bombers.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, they're little suicide bombers.  So nature proves -- again, we have to filter out the survivorship bias.  Everything that has survived this long has proven itself to be capable of surviving and passing a rigorous natural selection process.  Nature proves that the solution to the honeypot security problem is to sting your attacker, not for self-defence, for systemic defence.  You cause pain, you cause harm, you physically constrain, you impose physically prohibitive costs on your attacker, and that's how you're going to keep your honey secure, because you're going to think twice before you just reach in there and take something.  That cost makes you think twice.  The return on investment of just taking the honey is not quite as high, especially if you're allergic to the venom in the stinger. 

If you have irrigated land, how do you defend it?

Peter McCormack: I mean, you can have guards, walls. 

Jason Lowery: So stingers, right?  Another word for a guard is a stinger.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: A guard is holding a sword.  The UK, they did this really well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we built castles.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, you have castles.  So you have active and passive power projection capabilities.  But a lot of those farms were still outside of the castle, they couldn't put it around.  So you have to have the knights that go out there and sting anyone that tries to take the freshly irrigated land.  Okay, that's how you defend land.  Well now let's say we figure out how to do ships and we're sailing across the Mediterranean where we've got these goods, very valuable honey, passing across the Mediterranean.  How do you keep those goods secure as you go across the sea?

Peter McCormack: You get ships with stingers.

Jason Lowery: You get ships with stingers on them, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: Okay, so that's how you physically secure a resource.  Let's say early 1900s, we figure out airplanes. 

Peter McCormack: Mr Foch. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, thank you!  So I used to say, "Don't Foch this up".

Peter McCormack: Don't Foch this up, yeah, that was the final tweet on the thread, yeah.

Jason Lowery: But someone corrected me and was like, "Actually his name is pronounced 'Fosh'", and I was like, "Damn it!" 

Peter McCormack: I would have said, "Fosh off, you twat!" 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, but there's a couple points to that.  What I'm saying is as humans expand into different domains and generate goods -- 

Peter McCormack: I know, look, I see where this is going, but that's making me think, have we got stingers up there now?  

Jason Lowery: We have to prepare for that future, is the point.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so a different question is that I'm going to imagine if I was China and I wanted some weapons up there, I might disguise them as a satellite.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, you might disguise them as a research experiment with a robotic arm on it. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah. 

Jason Lowery: And you might say, "This isn't a stinger.  I'm just testing how to repair robots".

Peter McCormack: And if war was to break out, one of the most useful first things you could do is take out other people's satellites. 

Jason Lowery: Your phone, your GPS, your precision timing of all your networks, every geographic combatant command, how they talk, they're all talking through the satellites.  So, that's the weak spot, that's the honey.  Okay, if you want to just completely nerf everything that we've built, an aircraft carrier, everything from that to a Ford operating base, everything from your ability to get to that target on time at the same time as your friends all depends on space.  We use space, we touch space dozens of times per day, we just don't think about it because we can't see it.  So that's the honey, so sting that.

Peter McCormack: This is just a complete side point; when NASA or Elon Musk send a rocket up, do they have to know where all the satellites are to avoid them; it's not by chance they go, "Right, let's send it now, let's hope we don't hit one of these"?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, we have an entire squadron in the Space Force that is dedicated to tracking all the crap in space.  They send that information to us at the launch range to make sure that when we're launching rockets, that we don't run into stuff, and they also constantly send notifications to other countries to tell them, "Hey, you need to manoeuvre your satellite because you're on a [what we call] conjunction path".

Peter McCormack: It's air traffic control.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, air traffic control, but for space.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay, so if I was the US, without being able to look inside these research satellites or whatever, I'm going to make the assumption now that China and Russia has put weapons in space?

Jason Lowery: China overtly declared their own Space Force years ago.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Jason Lowery: Okay, so it gets back into what we talked about before.  If you've got a new power projection technology, if nations are clearly posturing themselves, then your only option is to sting back.  You have to completely change how you do everything, and so that's why we're like, "Okay, well if space is going to be a place where people duke it out battle-bot style, but in orbit, Star Wars style, then the first thing we have to do is formally declare space a combatant command", which we did.  I was part of the team that stood up, helped stood up, US Space Command, so a formal combatant command for space. 

Then you also have to have a service to organise, train, and equip forces to present to that combatant commander, which is why we need a Space Force.  You have to have a dedicated service whose sole job is to predict that future.  What's that going to look like; how do we build stingers in orbit; or, do we even need stingers in orbit?  Maybe if you want to take out that satellite, you just take out the ground station.  What are the command authorities; what are the technologies you need to use?  It's such a new and interesting problem set that you have to raise an entire new military service. 

But it makes perfect sense, because when we figured out how to go into the sea, we had Navy; when we figured out how to go in the air, we had Air Force; when we figured out how do we go into space and we're passing goods and services across space, it makes sense that we would need a Space Force. 

Peter McCormack: No, it totally makes sense.  You are allowed to openly just talk about this or there are restrictions on what you can talk about? 

Jason Lowery: I mean there's obviously restrictions, but in 2014 this was a taboo topic and there's just stuff we couldn't say. 

Peter McCormack: But are there now weapons in space? 

Jason Lowery: We formally declared GPS a weapon system. 

Peter McCormack: Are there weapons in space that can fire and shoot shit? 

Jason Lowery: Do you consider a Chinese robot satellite with a robot arm that can --

Peter McCormack: That can go and grab another satellite. 

Jason Lowery: -- grab another satellite and pull a -- do you call that a weapon? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I know what I'm asking, you know what I'm asking.  Are there missiles in space now; do we know; do we think; can you not even answer?

Jason Lowery: I mean, if I did know, I wouldn't be able to answer.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I thought so.

Jason Lowery: Hopefully, we would never see anything that because that would be a war without winners.  If you have debris in space, you get the Kessler effect.  You get just a bunch of -- one, if you blow up a satellite, that's bad.  That's happened a couple times.  You get so much debris, all those particles that can run into each other, that's a chain reaction.  You can pretty much destroy people's access to orbit if you do.  But what I can say is we've got Delta 9, Space Force Delta 9, orbital warfare.

Peter McCormack: And is there diplomacy about how you have a Space Force, we have a Space Force, let's talk, let's agree some rules?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so that is actually a big talking point right now with our leadership.  The words they use is, "We have to establish norms of behaviour in space".  What that really means is, when China launches a crappy satellite with a big balloon on it in 60,000 feet, it's a satellite but it has needs some help, it's got a big balloon on the top, and it can only get up to 60,000 feet, and if that goes over the United States, people freak out because we have established norms and behaviour, "You don't put that crap over me", so people freak out, okay? 

China buzzes past the tanker in the air, flies a J-20 just right across something, we see that on the news instantly because that is -- because of the norms of behaviour that we've established for air, that's considered an aggressive action.  You're a boat, let's say you're a ship, and then China just drives its destroyer right off your bow and is pointing guns and just flicking you off.  Okay, we have norms of behaviour to say, "That's an aggressive action, don't do that.  And if you do it again, I'm going to shoot back, or shoot first". 

That does not exist for space.  What if China launches something that flies a very tight orbit, a rendezvous proximity operation around a high value asset of ours; or visits all these other things with their research satellites?  We don't have norms of behaviour to say that's an aggressive action.  And no one can see it.  So, if they could only see what's happening in GEO right now!  If they freaked out over a piece-of-crap balloon, imagine what people would think if we established the norms of behaviour for orbit.  And so, we actually need that first so that we can say, "Okay, that's an aggressive action, don't do that.  If you do it again, you're going to get stung".

Peter McCormack: So what is your role in Space Force?

Jason Lowery: My role right now is to finish up my Department of the Air Force fellowship, and then now I'm seated at Cape Canaveral as the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for the launch ranges.  So, we have a West Coast launch range, an East Coast launch range, they're launching a bunch of rockets.  The rate at which we're launching a bunch of rockets is taking off because there's a new commercial space race happening right now.  And so, I exist to help our launch ranges have the technology, the data, just to bring in as much new technology to support the launch ranges as possible and to do it in a contested environment now.  Because if we've got a Space Force, we can no longer assume that there isn't going to be something trying to stop a launch using force. 

So, our launch ranges are a pot of honey.  That is a very nice, ripe, fat target of opportunity for a nefarious nation.  And so how do we launch in a contested environment?  These are the questions that we're starting to have to address. 

Peter McCormack: And what is your mandate with Bitcoin within Space Force?  Is this private initiative; is this just something you're interested in and writing about; is it something that you do within your work time; there's people within Space Force who are interested; is there pushback?

Jason Lowery: The way it works is when you're about halfway through your 20-year career as an officer, each military branch sends you to school and asks you to write about or research some topic.  Maybe it's policy, maybe it's new technology, and they use that to help make sure that we're reflecting and posturing ourselves in the future to be able to win, fight and win future conflicts.  So you take all these officers with decades worth of experience, you have them write things, study things of interest to the military, and then you send them back into training or whatever.  So it's a normal thing, where all military branches, about ten years or so, you go to school and you research things. 

For me, my job or my order was, "Go to MIT and research technologies, specifically the national strategic implications of emerging technologies".  It didn't have to be any specific technology. 

Peter McCormack: Okay, and you just stumbled across Bitcoin. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, and so here's the question that I faced when I started at MIT.  It's, okay, we had irrigated land, we had army; we had goods traveling across the sea, we had Navy; we had goods traveling across the air, we had Air Force; we have goods traveling across the space or orbit.  For the past five, seven years, I've been part of the initial cadre of officers supporting the stand-up of not only a combatant command dedicated to space, but also its own military branch dedicated to this thing.  So what happens when civilisation expands its footprint into cyberspace; what happens if we create a new resource in cyberspace called data; how do we secure zero trust, permissionless access to our data in cyberspace? 

Peter McCormack: Dude, it's the plebs, that's your army! 

Jason Lowery: So, when I say that, I get in a lot of trouble on Twitter. 

Peter McCormack: Pleb Force! 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, when I say Hash Force, Cyber Force, when I equate what the plebs are doing to a militia or a military, I get yelled at. 

Peter McCormack: You do know why though; you know why they're yelling at you?

Jason Lowery: I mean, there's so many different reasons. 

Peter McCormack: You've got to think of the birth of Bitcoin, the journey it's been on, the kind of people who have adopted it, promoted it, the reason they promoted it.  You've come in, essentially you're with the enemy, and they see you as the enemy, and they see you projecting Bitcoin as war, violence, which I know you've walked back a little bit, but it's a huge leap.  Sometimes, it's how you present it.  Now, the way you have presented it has created a whole load of interest because you blew up.  It's when I say back in the UK -- I have to be very careful how I explain things to people because people will think I'm a nutter if I just talk in a certain way.  So I have to be very careful about how I explain things.  I don't want people to think I'm Alex Jones. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so we talked about how American military doctrine came from the French.  When military people, my culture of people, not the pleb culture, my culture of people, talk about words like weapon, war or violence, that's not a bad thing, we don't equate that to something extraordinarily bad.  The French, when they were using that word in the early 1800s, were not using it the same as the English people do.  English people use the word violence as basically a catch-all for all things awful.  Everything bad that you could possibly do to another human, they put that under the catch-all word of violence. 

But how the French were talking about that term in the early 1800s is, violence means a violent chemical reaction or a violent storm or a violent reaction of some kind.  Violence in that world is, "To bring a bunch of force at something"; not for the sake of harming, that was added by the English, but just basically force projection or a sudden amount of force very quickly.

Peter McCormack: You can rationalise it --

Jason Lowery: I know.

Peter McCormack: -- I'm just telling you this is why it is.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, well, so I understand, but I'm not here to make people... 

Peter McCormack: I guess, do you care or not whether you have people on side; or is this your base reality, "Agree or disagree, I don't give a fuck, here it is"?

Jason Lowery: First, I'm trying to build a first principles understanding, or for me, I was trying to search for a first principles understanding of Bitcoin.  So we talked about nature, and all these things killing and fighting each other all the time.  You would call that violence.  You would call those weapons; their teeth, their claws, those are weapons, right?  You might call it warfare.  When humans do it, you call it warfare, you call it weapons, you call it violence.

Now, let's expand this entire paradigm of people physically securing their resources, imposing physically prohibitive costs on each other, physically constraining each other, in, from, through every single domain, all four domains, all mass-based three-dimensional domains, what would you call it?  What would you call it if you expand that same phenomenon into cyberspace, where people secure their data, secure the control or decentralise control over their data, using brute force power, which is what hashing represents?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I think we're going to get into the area where we may disagree or I may have to push back on, because we talked earlier about why humans are different.  We're conscious, we talked about we have diplomacy.  For me, consensus is diplomacy. 

Jason Lowery: Agreed. 

Peter McCormack: And therefore, I don't see it as an expression of force, I see it as an evolution of diplomacy.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so the best way to project a lot of power is to sum it together, is to cooperate.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so this isn't individual power, this is a collective projection of power?

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so you have pack animals and they stick together, right, they don't do their own thing, they stick together.  And because you have a pack, they are able to secure their resources better than if they were a lone wolf, for the example of a pack.  One of the major anthropological theories about humans is our ability to come to consensus actually helps us overcome Dunbar's number, which is a traditional cognitive limit of the amount of people that you can trust.  There's only so many faces that you can remember and trust.  And most animals have a physiological or cognitive limit to how many things they can cooperate with. 

But if we come to a same belief system, I don't have to know who you are, I just have to think that you believe the same thing you do, or I do, then suddenly we don't have to know or trust each other to cooperate with each other, and then we can blow past Dunbar's number and cooperate with people that we have no cognitive capacity to trust or understand.  And because we can do that, we can kill the Neanderthals, because they can't figure that out yet.  Or, because we can do that, we can take down, huge, woolly mammoths or whatever. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I didn't think about this earlier, Danny, but in some ways, I know you don't like the term war with the money. 

Danny Knowles: Definitely not in terms of Bitcoin, no.  I kind of reject that framing a little bit. 

Peter McCormack: Not in terms of Bitcoin.  But at the same time, bitcoiners collectively think Bitcoin is basically the best form of money, and we want it to succeed under threat of coercion and being crushed by the government, and therefore it's been built up in a defensive way.  So, I can see how the collective hash power is a deterrent to trying to 51% attack it, therefore our hash power is a collective projection of force of the strength of Bitcoin by bitcoiners.  I don't see it as violent and I'm not saying it's violent, but I see it as a projection of, "This is the power we've got, this is what you've got to come at". 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I mean I think it gets back to what you're saying earlier where you're saying a wall, a castle wall or a house wall or whatever is a passive form of a passive force.  I still struggle with that, so if I accept that as the idea, I totally agree with you.  I just don't know if I accept that a wall is force. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, let's talk about that.  Let's delete the words war, weapon, violence from the conversation.  That's why I constantly go back to power projection, because we can have this conversation.  That's why I talk about nature, because we can agree that nature is fighting and projecting power against each other; we can agree that to secure something, I have to sting you, or in effect a better way of securing something than us shaking hands is being able and willing to sting you if I need to.

Peter McCormack: I mean our sting could be litigation.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, that's an abstract form, but the problem of litigation is you're trying to adjudicate dispute and you have to hire a judge to determine that, and you have to trust the judge not to be corrupt.  So that's still a trust-based system.  So as far as I know, the only trustless, permissionless, zero-trust way of securing a resource or establishing consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of a resource is to fight over it, is to project power against each other. 

By the way, we know for sure that this activity of people projecting power to secure their resources also decentralises control over those resources.  So, a complex emergent effect of warfare is decentralisation of control over resources.  We know for sure because there's 193 different countries.  Anytime any person says, "I'm going to make one world government", we get in a huge fight over it, we project a lot of power, we call that warfare, and as a complex emergent property of that power projection, no person, no polity has ever been able to achieve centralised control over all the land.

Peter McCormack: And as they do, empires tend to crumble.

Jason Lowery: Yeah.  So, you know you've crossed the border of a country that doesn't want you to have control over that resource once you start getting shot at.  So that's how we communicate, "This is mine, this is yours".  We role play on top of that.  We hire people, you know, the UK people, I think it was you that started the ridiculous wigs of the judges, right?  We have these symbols of power but it's really just abstract power, it's not physical power.  And, King George or whoever is coronated and given that symbol of power, you'll notice their flanked and surrounded by a bunch of people with actual power, with physical power.  So, you have to always back your symbol of power with real power.

Peter McCormack: Do you struggle with the word power?

Danny Knowles: No, it's not power in this sense, but using your analogy, I would consider Bitcoin mining as the wall, not an armed guard.

Jason Lowery: Okay, so let's look into that.

Peter McCormack: Where's the sting?

Jason Lowery: Okay, we'll jump ahead a little bit just to address this, because I get this a lot.  Let's say you want to secure your resource, your data, okay?  One way you could do it, and Saylor talks about this, he started talking about the orange check a lot, or spam, for example, it's original use case of stuff was to

Peter McCormack: Hashcash.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, hashcash.  Actually, it goes back even further than that, but reducing spam, how do you reduce spam?  You encode a wall, and you say, "You can't send me a control action unless you accompany it with a proof of power or some proof of this, some reusable proof of work".  So if you do that, you've imposed a cost on the action of sending an email or a server request.  And the idea of proof of work is, "Well, if we do that, then we can actually impose a cost on people who would try to exploit that control action".  You can make it too expensive to sustain a spam attack on me, okay?  So I've created a wall through which the only control actions are people who collateralise it with a Bitcoin, if we say that, okay?  If I've done that, and this is where I think people get tripped up, I encoded the wall, but I encoded a wall in such a way that the only way you can attack me is with a proof of work, is with a reusable proof of work, a Bitcoin, a satoshi, whatever you want to call it.  So you've created a system through which the only way to be attacked is using this technology. 

So just logically speaking, it can't be a passive or only, I guess, technology.  And by the way, if you Google, if you just Control F the whitepaper, Satoshi says the word "attack" 25 times.  The entire whitepaper is him describing how it would be useful to use this thing to defend against people attacking you with the same protocol. 

Peter McCormack: That's interesting.  He is considering attacks. 

Danny Knowles: No, that's right, but I'm struggling to say why going through a turnstile at this wall in terms of doing, like a proof of work, why does that make it a pointy weapon, not just a wall with a turnstile?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, where's the sting?  By the way, doesn't that look a big tub of weed? 

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it does!

Peter McCormack: We talked about, you've got borders.  On the southern border of the US, you have a border, you have a wall, not the whole length of the country, but you have a border.  But you also have people who can shoot; that's the sting.  You have the submarines with the missiles, which is the sting; you have the airplanes with the missile, which is the sting; the Space Force, we don't know what's up there, but I think there's weapons up there, which is the sting.  Where it where is the sting on proof of work?  There's a wall you can get through, so you get through it; there's no sting. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so you've discussed four domains.  Every single one of those domains is a three-dimensional domain, it's got three-dimensional space as we know it, and it has mass as we know it.  So, if you if you apply a force to a mass to push it a distance across a three-dimensional domain, you have produced or you have expended watts to do it.  And whether those watts are used to stab you or to deflect something, watts are watts.  That's how people physically constrain.  We would call that, in the business of the military, a kinetic form of power projection.  All four of those domains, three-dimensional domains, mass-based domains, you're projecting power, you're producing watts, you're physically constraining people with watts in different ways, but at the end of the day, force displacing mass across a distance is a watt.  Just from a physical standpoint, it's also known as power, watts are power.  You've done that in each of those domains the same way. 

If we expand our presence into cyberspace, if we create a new resource that we want to pass across this domain from port to port in cyberspace, we have to immediately recognise up front, this is not a three-dimensional domain consisting of masses.  So there will be no forces displacing masses kinetically as we exist in other domains.  It won't look the same kind of sting we've seen in other domains, but that doesn't mean that you can't still utilise watts, power, as a form or as a mechanism to physically constrain or to impose severe, physically prohibitive costs on people who would try to deny your access to your data, your resource in this domain, or would try to denial-of-service attack you, or try to exploit you through this domain. 

You can still physically secure yourself in cyberspace using watts in cyberspace, just like you do in the other domain, you just have to recognise upfront that that stinger will not have mass and will not be in three-dimensional space, it's going to look different.  But the function of physical defence, of people duking it out, will effectively be the same.  The function of physical defence remains the same.  The form changes because the form of the domain is different.  All right, so now you have to play this really interesting thought experience in your brain.  You go, "Okay, cyberspace, how do we try to keep ourselves secure in cyberspace?  If I don't want you to have my data, how do I try to do that?"  Right now, the predominant way that people attempt to secure their resources in cyberspace, attempt to secure themselves against the exploitation of the Elon Musks out there who are in control of the software, is to try to find some magical combination of logic to secure yourself. 

People think that there's some combination of if-then-else statements, four while loops, that they can encode into their software to secure their data, to secure their access to the data, to prevent them from being denial-of-service attacks, to prevent them from being systemically exploited through their software.  Okay, when people act like that, they are being incongruent to 4 billion years of nature and 10,000 years of humans securing their resources in every domain that they've expanded into.  It doesn't make sense for people to even believe from the beginning that you can sufficiently secure your data using nothing but encoded logic, when in every other domain, you physically secure your resources using power, using watts. 

So there's actually a big, gaping hole in cybersecurity right now, where people can't use -- they can, Bitcoin solves that problem -- but for whatever reason, people don't realise that the key missing ingredient for physical security or security in general in cyberspace is the capacity to impose a physically prohibitive cost, or physically constrain people from denial-of-service attacking them or executing some type of belligerent activity.

Danny Knowles: But does encryption not solve that rather than proof of work?

Jason Lowery: If encryption solved it alone, then we would say Ethereum works and proof of stake is enough.

Danny Knowles: But you're talking about much broader than just Bitcoin, right, you're talking about anything in cyberspace?

Jason Lowery: Right.  So the way that I look at it is, how do you secure data?  We can just start there.  Data's becoming a super-valuable resource in cyberspace, pretty much everyone agrees.  How do you secure zero trust and permissionless access to your data; how do you decentralise control over your data?

Peter McCormack: Hold on, go back a second.  You say everyone agrees that data…  What did you say then again?

Jason Lowery: Is a valuable resource in cyberspace.

Peter McCormack: What data's valuable; secrets?

Jason Lowery: It could be anything.

Peter McCormack: Secrets, IP? 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so let's go back to computer theory.  Cyberspace is just a bunch of bits, 1s and 0s. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah, of course. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, you might choose to call those bits your coin.  So those bits are very important and valuable to you.  Someone else might choose to call those bits their personal data, I don't know, their social security number or something.  Someone else might choose to call those bits their company secrets.  Someone else might choose to call those bits their right to free speech. 

Peter McCormack: So, most of it is secrets that you don't want someone to get access to, because once they have access to those secrets, they can exploit those secrets.  But Bitcoin's slightly different, it's a UTXO set that says, "I own that UTXO set".

Jason Lowery: I think we can go even more generic than that.  So for example, you tweeted today about censoring through Twitter, Elon censoring through Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Yes! 

Jason Lowery: So, he's denial-of-service attacking people from producing and transferring information through cyberspace. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay. 

Jason Lowery: It's not necessarily secrets, you want to be able to say what you feel.  You don't want it to be a secret, but you still can't get it across because it's being censored.  Those bits of information are valuable to you.  And it sucks that you have to trust somebody not to denial-of-service attack your ability to transfer those bits of information.  So how do you sting them; how do you sting it?

Danny Knowles: But this is solved on Nostr with encryption, but without proof of work.

Jason Lowery: So, how do you something on Nostr? 

Danny Knowles: I don't understand the question.  What do you mean by that?

Jason Lowery: One of the features, awesome security features, that Nostr has, is whenever you implement a like or voting system, that can be cyberattacked, so people can spam that voting system.  The Russian IRA actually actively does this to me on Twitter.  So, someone will say something super-mean and it'll have maybe 150 views and 150 likes.  And then if you expand, "Who's liking this thing?" they're all Russian bots, okay.  That's a form of cyberattack.  So how do you secure yourself against some type of exploitation like that?  Well you say, "You can't like something unless you collateralise it with a sat".  So, when people are Zapping each other on Nostr, they're actually using Bitcoin itself as the security protocol, not as money, as a security protocol.

Danny Knowles: But that doesn't stop people from saying what they want. 

Jason Lowery: Yes.  So that goes back to the main attack vector is still through -- it doesn't stop them.  Okay, let me back up because I think this is an easier way to explain it.  Manoeuvre warfare, we talked about that, right?  Stop paying attention to offense, defence, think of manoeuvre warfare.  You want to position yourself in the best way possible so that when you inevitably do get attacked, that you take the fight that you know you can win. 

So, let's say that human beings create some new computer network, where instead of producing bits from transistors or any of the other technologies that are in current computers, instead they convert electric power to bits, so they convert watts to bits.  You create a new network where bits of coin, let's call it, are passing across each other because large sums of physical power are moving across each other.  Then what you've effectively done is you've created a network through which you can impose a physically prohibitive cost on anyone trying to send those bits back and forth to each other. 

This is something that gets back to the chapter five of the thesis, which is you should consider Bitcoin basically a big, gigantic, heavy, super, energy-intensive computer.  Compared to a normal computer, it is really difficult, physically difficult, it takes a lot of power to send bits of information and settle those bits of information through the Bitcoin network.  That's the point of proof of work, is to physically constrain the ability to change the state or to write the ledger because if you do that, then you can secure yourself against someone who's trying to gain centralised control over that network. 

But the point is, Bitcoin is a very physically expensive network, and it's physically difficult to send bits back and forth to each other.  That's interesting, because that means you can use this network to physically constrain the transfer of data across cyberspace, or you could use this network to physically constrain the execution of a control action.  That's why Back was like, "Hey, you can't send me an email unless it's backed by, or stamped", as he called it, "with a proof of work".  They didn't have those words back when he first wrote it, but that's what we can call it now. 

So, what he's done by coupling the transfer, this control action, the sending an email to a proof of work, is actually made it so that the only way that you can send me an email is if you go through the physical constraint of solving, in this case, the hashing algorithm.  That means that the only way you can spam me, or attack me, or exploit me, is through these reusable proofs of work.  Why would you want that?  Because I want to take the fight that I know I can win.  If the only way you can attack me is by sending me these control actions that are coupled or collateralised by a reusable proof of work, then that means I know that you cannot sustain that attack for very long.  I can just wait you out because there is a severe physically prohibitive cost for you to spam me now. 

So I've created a wall through which the only way a bad guy can get through it is if they're carrying Bitcoin or a reusable proof of work, as Hal Finney would call it.  And I want to be attacked by people using reusable proof of work because I know that unlike anywhere else in cyberspace, unlike any other control action in cyberspace, that that attack is physically constrained.  That you are paying a severe physically prohibitive cost in watts to execute that attack.  That's how we protect against 51% attacks in Bitcoin. 

Peter McCormack: So, are you saying that proof of work should be applied to all these data systems to protect them; what are you saying? 

Jason Lowery: That would suck because it would be super-slow and you know really energy-intensive to do that. 

Peter McCormack: So what are you saying then? 

Jason Lowery: I'm saying that there are very specific control actions that you would want to couple to a reusable proof of work in order to secure it.  Not everything, not a transfer of all data. 

Peter McCormack: Walk me through it like I'm 5 what you're actually saying, because I am lost now.  So, give me examples, some data you want to secure, and how this has been secured.

Jason Lowery: How about instead of data, well okay, yeah, data.  Bitcoin is proof that proof of work works.  We know that it is incontrovertibly true that Bitcoin has been able to secure itself using this proof of work protocol.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Jason Lowery: So, the control action that's --

Peter McCormack: Hold on.  It's proved in this scenario for Bitcoin; other shitcoins that have launched have tried, and they have been 51% attacked when they haven't had enough proof of work, when the incentives changed enough that it was attackable. 

Jason Lowery: Enough power.

Peter McCormack: Yes. 

Jason Lowery: So, they've tried to use it, but they got overpowered.  You can have a shitcoin proof-of-work system, but it's not going to have remotely as much watts backing it as Bitcoin does. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, this is why I need the example of what data you -- give me a real-world example. 

Jason Lowery: So the real-world example is control over the Bitcoin ledger.  That's the easiest one because everyone knows.  So, in order to write the ledger to add the next batch of 100 transactions to the next block, what do you have to do in order to have that privilege, that special control action of writing the next block?

Peter McCormack: You have to find the secret.

Jason Lowery: You have to solve the hashing algorithm, right?  But another way to say the same thing is, there's an exorbitant physical cost of doing that.  A lot of watts are being expended and for the right of that one control action, just to add the next 2,000-ish transactions to the next block, okay?  That was one of the big differences between Hal Finney reusable proof of work and Satoshi Bitcoin, is, "Hey, whoever gets the privilege to choose which valid transactions get added to the next block simultaneously has the ability to withhold valid transactions from the next block".  So you can denial-of-service attack people or censor people by simply withholding valid transaction requests from the next block. 

That is a very sensitive control action, we have to secure that.  How do we secure it?  Well, you impose a severe physically prohibitive cost on the ability to execute that control action, that special administrative privilege that you have to write the next block.

Peter McCormack: Which we already have in Bitcoin.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so Bitcoin is confusing because it's recursively valuable.  It proves that proof of work works as a cybersecurity system, and one of the big security things that it does is it makes it too physically prohibitive, too physically costly for any one person or polity, ie group of people, to be able to continuously write the ledger, to have that very special privilege of writing the ledger.  It literally requires so many watts now that is not realistic for someone to be able to gain and maintain full control over that.  So, that's your example of how you can use physical power to physically restrict some sensitive control action to secure you against someone interfering with you, because if he's blocking your transactions, then he's denying your ability to send bits.

Peter McCormack: But I know all this.  What I'm saying is, are you talking about other examples where this can be used to protect other forms of data?

Jason Lowery: So look at Nostr, let's go back to Nostr.

Peter McCormack: But there's no proof of work in Nostr.

Danny Knowles: I don't think so.  It's just public-private key cryptography, right?

Jason Lowery: I got Russian bots, a lot of people have bot problems, okay?  Russian bots will like --

Peter McCormack: Don't say that too quickly!

Jason Lowery: Yeah, right!  Russian bots will cyberattack the liking system and just distort your perception of reality because -- 

Peter McCormack: I've seen it. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, so how do you secure against that; how do you make it too physically prohibitive to sustain a cyberattack by exploiting the likes on a social network to tilt and exploit the feeds?  Well, one way to do it is say, "You can't send a or make a unless you collateralise it with a proof of work or a proof of power".  And that's precisely what Nostr does with Zaps, when you Zap people money.

Peter McCormack: But a Zap is not a like, a Zap is a Zap.  There's likes outside of Zaps.

Jason Lowery: Right, but you're using Zaps as I guess, a social signal. 

Peter McCormack: But they aren't necessary, they aren't required.  I mean, I think I've Zapped one person.  I just like stuff when I see it, that's a like. 

Jason Lowery: Okay, so email, back to email.  You can't send me an email unless you stamp it with a proof of work.  There are several companies working on technologies like this, basically a Lightning wall.  And you can't send a control action, send me data, send me an email, whatever you want, unless you collateralise it, unless you accompany it with a proof of work. 

Peter McCormack: But how are you securing data here?  You're talking about spam prevention here. 

Jason Lowery: That's spam prevention. 

Peter McCormack: You're talking about Sybil, but the thesis or the thread talks about protection of data, securing the data. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, that's one of them.  It's securing data, defending against the systemic exploitation of software.  So that's where the Zaps comes in.  It's hard to systemically exploit Zaps like you can do likes.  You can't cyberattack Zaps as easily as you can likes.

Peter McCormack: I mean you can right now because what you could do is, I mean I don't know what the biggest posts on Nostr have and what they get in terms of Zaps, there's a cost to making -- but you could have that cost, you could spend that, you have a choice. 

Jason Lowery: Some high roller can walk in and give 1,000 Bitcoin to some post that he likes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Lowery: So, yeah, you can still attack, but the mechanism through which you launch that attack is restricted by the amount of Bitcoin that you own.

Peter McCormack: Because the email one, I get it, it makes sense.  When you run the maths of email spam, spammers used to send millions and millions of emails and they get such a tiny conversion rate, but that conversion rate will work because there was no cost to sending the spam.  You put that proof of work in there, suddenly there's a cost because they can't match the conversion rate, they lose money.  So, that makes sense and to prevent against Sybil attacks, yes, but it doesn't stop it.  It's not cost-prohibitive because there isn't the same kind of conversion rate in the end.  I'm saying you can spend money on -- you could even, if there was a cost of likes, you could still exploit that.

Yeah, true, but you could only exploit it insofar as the amount of Bitcoin you own, and that's the key.  You want to take the fight that you can win.  If you can't launch the attack because you're prohibited by the amount of Bitcoin you own, then you know that they can't spam that forever.  They're going to go bankrupt basically or they're going to run out.

Danny Knowles: I mean there's two things on the likes thing.  So Nostr has relays and people kick people off relays, getting rid of it.  But also, there's no attack in a like, is there?  I don't understand what you're trying to stop.

Jason Lowery: Well you exploit a like, you attack people by exploiting the likes.  I did this with my blocking campaign.

Peter McCormack: It's more of a problem on Twitter because the algorithm uses likes.

Danny Knowles: But people liking your post doesn't have a negative impact on you.

Peter McCormack: Well, it can, because if the algorithm reads the likes and then brings more awareness of that post to other people because of that, it might bring the wrong awareness to people and you have more people coming in shouting at you and talking shit and creating disinformation. 

Jason Lowery: You can be exploited through it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, with an algorithm, but I don't think you can with Nostr because the likes, they're just a like.  There's no algorithm integration, it's just a signal. 

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: I use Nostr because that is one of what I think will be many different social media experiments where they incorporate Bitcoin into the system.  And you may think of it as a paywall, but it's not.  What makes Bitcoin different than a USD paywall is that Bitcoin is a zero-trust, decentralised system and most importantly, it is a physically constrained system.  It is physically difficult to exploit that feature, not logically difficult to exploit that feature.  And then the last thing I'll say for data, because I know you're really pushing on it, I'll give an example of securing data. 

If you want to send goods across from port to port, to secure that good, make sure it gets from this port to that port without a pirate taking it or blockading it, you hire a Navy.  You project power, you make it too physically difficult to deny your good from getting from port to port.  Let's say you have a bit of information that you choose to represent as, I don't know, financial settlements between nation states, or just money in general.  How do you ensure that that bit of good, this data, it can get to where it needs to go without being denial-of-service attacked?  That's one way to secure data, is to prevent it from being denial-of-service attacked.

Bitcoin proves that to avoid a sustained denial-of-service attack, that you can use physical power to do it.  That's what Bitcoin represents from a fundamental perspective is, here's a way that you can secure your data, you can prevent it from being denial-of-service attacked, you can move this bit of information from one wallet to another wallet without having to fear that it will be denial-of-service attacked, at least sustained, you'll eventually get it from one side to another precisely because so many people contribute to the system where it's too physically prohibitive to do it. 

Peter McCormack: And so look, you're calling it force.

Jason Lowery: I call it power prediction. 

Peter McCormack: Power prediction.  I might call it the strength of the system, and Danny, you might call it something else, but what we're all essentially saying is the same thing, is that this is a robust, strong system that is hard to attack; we're just saying it in different ways. 

Jason Lowery: But the thing that I think a lot of people miss is the reason why it's secure is not exclusively because of the logic encoded into the software, it's because of the hardware at the base layer.  The actual state mechanism, the actual computer itself, the process through which you convert some physical state change into a bit of information is different at the base layer; whereas everything else is trying to design the most energy-efficient and smallest computer network or hardware, I guess you could call it, they want the smallest and energy efficient hardware.  Bitcoiners have gone the different way.  They've reverse-optimised it.  They're creating the largest and most energy-intensive hardware to transfer bits of information.  People don't understand, first of all, that that reverse optimisation has happened; and secondly, they don't understand that --

Peter McCormack: I think they do. 

Jason Lowery: Well, Bitcoiners do. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think Bitcoiners do.  I think systems sometimes are designed necessary for what their role is.  Bitcoin is a system which necessitates this because you want to avoid double-spending and stealing Bitcoin.  And if you can exploit it, you can exploit all of Bitcoin.  So while Bitcoin is this decentralised network that's spread over computers all around the world, if you manage to hack it and double-spend, you're attacking the entire system, not one component of this.  Whereby, you picked up your phone when you talked a moment ago.  My phone is protected by cryptography.

Jason Lowery: Logic, encoded logic. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, encoded logic, but cryptography.

Jason Lowery: It's just encoded logic though. 

Peter McCormack: But it's hard to break into my phone.  If I'm gone, I'm dead, we know, we've seen the FBI, they've gone to Apple and said, "Can you unlock this phone for us?" and they're like, "Fuck off!" 

Jason Lowery: It's logically hard.

Peter McCormack: But if you get access to my phone, you only have access to my phone, not all of Apple.  So systems are sometimes necessarily designed right for the use and the risk profile.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so if the data's not super-important, international financial settlements, then yeah, use logical constraints, use encryptions to do it.  But what makes Bitcoin so special is that it doesn't rely exclusively on encoded logic, it doesn't rely exclusively on encryption.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it can't.  It's that symbiotic relationship between encryption and proof of work is what provides security.

Jason Lowery: Proof of work, what that really means is a crap ton of power.  So, let's go back.  How do we decentralise control over land?  We engage in a global-scale, physical power competition for control over that land, and as a complex, emergent effect of that physical power competition, control over land is decentralised.  How do you decentralise control over the ability to write the ledger?  You engage in a giant-scale, physical power competition, and as a complex, emergent effect of that global-scale, physical power competition, the control over these bits of data we call Bitcoin is decentralised.  So you're achieving the same complex, emergent effect of warfare using the same physics as warfare by imposing physically prohibitive costs on anyone who would try to deny your service to your bits.

Peter McCormack: Is all we're doing really here is having a different way of describing what Bitcoin is?

Jason Lowery: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: This is all it's come down to is, you see it how it works, I see how it works, you see it, we all see it exactly the same way; you're just describing it in a different way.  We spent two hours to figure out you describe it differently!  But there's a reason, this is important, right? 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, so let's talk about why I describe it this way.  First of all, whenever you're describing any form of software, how it works, all of that can only be done using metaphors.  There is no technically precise way to describe the functionality and purpose of software.  The word "software" itself is a metaphor.  At the end of the day, all that's happening is a physical state changes from on to off, and we choose to represent that as a bit of information, either true or false, 1 or 0, some Boolean logic.  And then we just write some special combination of logic to navigate the flipping of those bits, and so we give descriptions of software.  This is a fundamental principle of computer theory and computer science.  We describe the software based off of what we think the intended functionality of that is, or based off of the easiest possible way to explain how it works. 

So when it was first created, when proof of work was first described, it was called a client-server architecture.  Then it was called a stamp by Back and then a hashcash by Back.  Then it was called proof of work by these other random people who also called the first proof of work a -- I always forget because it's so ridiculous -- bread pudding protocol.  Then, it was called reusable proofs of work by Hal; then it was called Bitcoin by Satoshi.  So we're just calling it different things, using different words, but that's how all software works.

Peter McCormack: Yes, of course.

Jason Lowery: So, our job is to find the right combination of metaphors to describe the intended functionality and the properties of this thing.

Peter McCormack: Actually, to the right audience interestingly, who was it yesterday said to me, "How do you describe Bitcoin?"

Danny Knowles: Oh, when we were on the call with the marketing lady. 

Peter McCormack: Yes.  I was asked how to describe Bitcoin and my response to her was I said, "It depends on the audience". 

Jason Lowery: Exactly. 

Peter McCormack: So what we're really coming down to is that Jason Maier has written a book, A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin.  He's found a way to talk about Bitcoin to progressives.  And Jason William has written Hard Money You Can't Fuck With, which is a way to talk to bros about Bitcoin.  Alex Gladstein has written what he's written, Check Your Financial Privilege, to write to activists and people who care about human rights about Bitcoin.  Is this really just Jason Lowery's way of talking to people about Bitcoin in Jason Lowery's world? 

Jason Lowery: It's funny, when people finally stop and read and listen to me, they all come to the same conclusion.  It's like, "Okay, well I can agree with all the logic you're saying", you just have to take the time to listen to the logic, more or less.

Peter McCormack: Let's not recycle this, but I'm still not in the place where a wall is a projection of force.  For me, a wall is just a barrier.  That's me.  We can go around this in circles.  Danny's similar.  But I'm really interested in, what's the point?  And I think the point is, this whole thing is I think you believe in Bitcoin, you see the benefit to the US, you see it as having a national security reason for the US to be interested in it, and so you've found a way to explain it to the people who need to hear that within the government; whereas what I do is I find a way to tell my mate, Sam, down the pub in Bedford.  That's all we're doing.

Jason Lowery: A bit of information can represent any kind of information, including financial information but not limited to financial information.  We can call a bit a coin if we want to use it as money, but we're not restricted to only using that as money. 

Peter McCormack: Yes. 

Jason Lowery: Okay.  Pretty much everyone can agree with that, it's basic logic.  Okay, so what Bitcoin represents is a way to physically secure information that we choose to call our money using the combination of not just logic, like most systems, but also whoppingly large amounts of physical power.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: That is, from a cyber security perspective, revolutionary.  We've been talking about it for 30 years, Bitcoin finally proves that it works in an operationally relevant environment.  It is proof that proof of work works as a physical security system.  That's something that we have not really seen in the world of computer theory.  So first of all, right there, boom, that's a big deal.

Peter McCormack: That's fucking cool.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, it's really awesome.  Obviously, if you create the most physically secure bits of information, that would double as a kick-ass money, because you could stop entire nation states from denial-of-service attacking you.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Jason Lowery: Okay, so it makes perfect sense that the first use case of this badass physical security network would be money.  But that wouldn't be limited to just money because bits of information can represent any kind of information.  So it's just a question of specifically what kind of information or control signals do we want to physically secure ourselves from.  So Bitcoin, if you zoom out a little bit, is now a physical security system in addition to a kick-ass money.

Peter McCormack: I think you've told this stuff too many times now, because the speed at which you're telling me data is getting faster and faster!  Look I get what you're saying, but what do you care about?  Are your interests here in, where else can this technology be used; or in communicating this to the government so they don't make the grave mistake of turning their back on Bitcoin; what do you care about most?

Jason Lowery: Mostly it's the latter. 

Peter McCormack: Yes. 

Jason Lowery: And so, let's talk about the advantages of framing it this.  We talked about how if you create a wall, a logical constraint that says you can't spam me or execute a control action unless it's collateralised by Bitcoin, what you've effectively done is said, "The only way that you can attack me is if you can collateralise it with Bitcoin".  We talked about how you can't cyberattack the Zapping system beyond the amount of Bitcoin that you own, okay?  So, by using Bitcoin as a cybersecurity network and refusing for data or control signals to be sent across this encoded logic gate, unless it's collateralised by Bitcoin, then what you've done is effectively created a system where the only way, the only attack vector, is through Bitcoin. 

Now let's say people figure this out and they start just building these encoded logic walls, "You can't do anything, you can't send information, you can't spam me unless you collateralise it by Bitcoin".  Now the only way to attack or systemically exploit is through Bitcoin.  In that world, who has the Bitcoin is a big deal.  You don't want Russia, China to have all the Bitcoin in that world, you don't want your adversaries to have all the Bitcoin in that world.  If you've created these logical gates where the only attack vector is through people who wield Bitcoin, which is the attack that you want to take, you want to take the fight that you can win, because if you at least reduce the attack vector to there, you know that they can't sustain that attack because they're physically constrained, they don't have enough Bitcoin to do it.

Peter McCormack: And money is power Bitcoin is inevitable.

Jason Lowery: So, I believe that Bitcoin actually can equally be called Bitpower because you're converting watts into bits and you're using those bits to physically constrain, to secure your resources, just like we do in every domain.  I believe that whoever has Bitcoin will have Bitpower in the future, you will be able to project powers in ways that we can't even imagine yet, and --

Peter McCormack: But purely because money is power? 

Jason Lowery: Purely because the bits of information are literally produced by power.  What a hashing infrastructure does is convert large quantities of watts, power, physical power into bits of information.  That is completely unique at the base layer.

Peter McCormack: Look, you see, this is the bit where you're losing me because you're saying whoever has the Bitcoin has the power, but the power is the value of the Bitcoin. 

Jason Lowery: Not exclusively.  We happen to apply monetary value to these bits.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but what other value do they have?

Jason Lowery: To physically restrain anyone who tries to transfer those bits.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Jason Lowery: It's too physically difficult to send or spam a bunch of control signals or to denial-of-service attack people who transfer these bits.  So the other value of Bitcoin, besides if you just monetise those bits, is that you can use those bits as a way to physically constrain people.

Peter McCormack: How; tell me how?  So, I know I've got it as money, and I want to send some to Danny, I've got it.  I know if Bitcoin goes to $10 million, I've got a lot of wealth, I've got a lot of power with that wealth, what I can do.  But how else can I use these bits to physically constrain people?

Jason Lowery: You can't send a server request to me or an email to me unless it's collateralised by Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but it's still money.  But what you're saying is, the reason it works is because it's ubiquitous and it's the best money that people trust.

Jason Lowery: What I'm saying is, when I say you can't send me an email unless you collateralise it with Bitcoin, you're saying, okay, the cost is --

Peter McCormack: Hold on, sorry to interrupt.  I think I get it.  I think what you're saying is, we finally have the tool to do this.  I can't send you dollars…

Jason Lowery: So, if I say you can't send me an email unless you collateralise it by Bitcoin, I'm imposing two costs on you.  I'm imposing a financial cost, because society has chosen to monetise those bits.  So there's the financial cost, an abstract cost.  But then there's a no-kidding, real-world, three-dimensional-space, physical cost.  You can't send that bit, that bit can't go from your wallet to my wallet unless the base layer architecture expends a hell of a lot of watts to do it; a lot of watts are being spent.  So there is now a physical constraint on the transfer of that bit.  So I've now defended myself or secured myself against this attack. 

Peter McCormack: But that happens outside of me, I don't have to care about that.  Why do I have to care about that proof of work happening?  It's just happening.  All I have to do is -- do you understand why I'm getting lost here?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'm getting a bit lost too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: I don't understand.  All you're doing in that case is you're excluding yourself from the system unless something's collateralised by Bitcoin, which I understand, and that might be really useful at times; but it's you excluding yourself rather than -- well, maybe that's the same thing, maybe I'm just saying it from the other direction.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, you're excluding yourself from a whole bunch of different server requests, spams, email requests, whatever.  You're just saying, "None, I don't accept any of those, except for the ones that have been stamped with a proof of work".

Peter McCormack: So you're basically saying the Bitcoin is the most trusted protocol to do this, you have to be part of Bitcoin to start having benefits of these services?

Jason Lowery: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Danny Knowles: But why in this world does more Bitcoin mean more power?

Jason Lowery: Because if you say you can't send me an email unless it's collateralised by a sat, you've imposed a physical cost using power. 

Peter McCormack: I get the physical cost. 

Jason Lowery: But now, you can only send me as many control actions or server requests or emails as you have Bitcoin.  So you are physically, logically and financially constrained from attacking me.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, so the financial constraint is having the Bitcoin to do it; the physical constraint is being part of the protocol using Bitcoin?

Jason Lowery: The financial constraint is the value of the collateralised sats that you use.  You lose that value, your net worth has now decreased slightly.  The physical cost is all the watts that's required to do it.

Peter McCormack: But I don't need any watts.  That's other people doing that.

Jason Lowery: Yeah, they're doing it on your behalf, but you're paying them for that service, just like you pay people to secure your property.

Peter McCormack: In that I'm paying the transaction fee --

Danny Knowles: To the miners.

Jason Lowery: And you're also accepting a little, small, exponentially decreasing amount of debasement because of the exponentially decreasing block subsidy.

Peter McCormack: Okay I think I'm there. 

Jason Lowery: So, we still haven't talked about why. 

Peter McCormack: So why frame it like this?  Is it back to my recent film I made with Troy Cross?  He thinks the US Government is on the verge of making a huge mistake with Bitcoin. 

Jason Lowery: So, we can describe software using any metaphor that we want, based off of intended functionality, potential use cases, and ability to explain it to other people.  So again, I'm this military officer at school --

Peter McCormack: Spook!

Jason Lowery: -- and my job is to explain the national, strategic security implications of this emerging technology to my bosses, up to the Joint Chiefs.  So General Brown himself green-lighted this.  So how do I explain the value of this Bitcoin thing to that audience in a way that they understand, okay, in a way that will orange pill them, so they understand the difference between Bitcoin and shitcoin, they understand the difference between proof of work and proof of stake, or they at least can recognise that there is no substitute, there is no second-place proof-of-work network to Bitcoin?  How do I orange pill them the fastest, using words and metaphors that they understand the best; and at the same time, how do I also simultaneously -- I've got to find a careful way of saying this since I am -- how do I find a way to make it so that it is clear that the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve are not qualified to be talking about the national, strategic implications of Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: See this is really interesting, so this is where me and Danny were talking about it.  We had a point difference in that using the word "war", but I think we're constantly in economic war anyway, I think we're in economic war now.  I think the US has used the dollar strategically. 

Jason Lowery: Sanctions are an act of war, they always have been. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but in many different ways, and I think we're seeing a reaction to that right now with the BRICS nations, what China is doing.  I think there is always an economic war at play because it isn't just people doing business with each other voluntarily.  Money is used strategically on a geopolitical level.  So I understand that and I see that, and I've felt for a very long time that there are two ways money can go: it can centralise, the way China's done it, and it can be tied to social systems and control; or, it can be decentralised and represent freedoms.  I think if the US tries to centralise, it cannot do that as well as China, because it has institutions and relatively free people with guns who can fight back.  So if you can't win centralisation, win decentralisation. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, but even if you just delete this idea of money altogether and you think of how do you physically secure bits of information in cyberspace; how do you preserve people's freedom of action, ability to transfer bits of information or utilise this cyber domain without being denial-of-service attacked?  You frame proof of work as that thing and you frame Bitcoin as the largest proof-of-work network.  Yeah, people have chosen to financially value these bits, but that's just bitcoiners.  Other people could use these bits for other reasons too, and are starting to.  

If you have that conversation, if you have the power projection conversation, if you have the physical security conversation, if you have the conversation where we trace how every domain that humans have expanded into have searched for and found some way to physically constrain others in order to secure their system, then suddenly you get back to this conversation that we had before which is, if they've got nukes and you don't, then the only response, the only rational response, you have no choice, you must master this technology, you have to adopt it as quickly as possible. 

If the world is adopting a physical power projection technology for cyberspace, a new base layer, physically secure internet, and the only way to attack people through it is by collateralising their bits, ie by using Bitcoin, then you must adopt this technology.  This is not a conversation, this is not a negotiation.  It is adapt or die, cooperate or die.  The Department of Treasury is not qualified to be talking about this, the Federal Reserve Bank is not qualified to be talking about this.  If we just throw away this coin part, all these other people masquerading as experts in proof-of-work technology look ridiculous.  And at the same time, you prove that the ESG narrative about this being inefficient is also equally ridiculous. 

So, manoeuvre warfare, take the fight you can win.  If you want to defeat the Department of Treasury, all these ESG FUDsters, all these shitcoiners, and the Federal Reserve, take them on head-on, and simultaneously say that, "We have no choice but to adopt this.  I don't care what you have to say, we have to adopt it", then frame it as I just framed it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, see this is the interesting point, is that I agree with you, but I'm on a different framing.  Mine's a little bit more simple but it's exactly the same point, is that we don't know, well a lot of us think Bitcoin is inevitable, but it's not inevitable, but we think it's got a high chance of being successful.  If you want to strategically be a wealthier, more successful nation, because that has a strategic position for you, and there is a chance that this becomes a global money and you can't stop that happening, then you might as well adopt it, be the best at it, and be a step ahead of everybody else.  The US had a benefit for being the first to have nuclear weapons.  Whatever we think of how horrific it was, there was; we talked about that earlier.  So be the first and best with Bitcoin.

Jason Lowery: The problem is if you frame it -- first of all, there are so many people who are way more intelligent and talented at discussing Bitcoin as money and the financial implications of money than I am.  So, I'm already outclassed.  I can't make a better argument than other people have already made about that.  But equally as valuable to nations is security; equally as valuable to nations is the ability to transfer financial information back and forth and the ability to physically secure your ability to do that; equally as valuable to nations and people in general, something that they will buy off on is, "Hey, we created a non-lethal form of warfare where we can secure our data, we can decentralise control over our data, but we can do it without causing any fratricide.  In fact, the side effects are awesome.  We get cheaper energy, we get better infrastructure, we get it harder for this cabal of people to exploit us through our financial systems". 

That is, in my opinion, an untapped angle that people haven't been considering and I think that we could help people navigate the shitcoin jungle if we start there.  And it's not a think, I'm doing this actively in the government now.  I can flip people in high places from, "Bitcoin's a waste of energy" to, "Is it too late to build our own proof-of-work network within 30 minutes using this argument?"  So I know for sure that it orange pills people really quickly and gets them to think and step back and be like, "Holy crap, why is the Department of Treasury leading the conversation on the National Security Council?  Who says they know anything about this technology?  Why isn't the DOD involved with this?  Why isn't DARPA involved with this?  Why aren't we considering this entirely new unchecked angle?" 

The last thing is, let's just for the sake of argument assume this is a correct theory, that it is true that we have created a new form of warfare, a new form of physical security system, a new way to compete against each other to control this underlying precious resource, then what are the consequences, if I believe this, the consequences of me saying it and being wrong versus the consequences of me being right but never saying it?

Peter McCormack: Dude, it's the same asymmetric bet that Satoshi said -- was it Satoshi or Hal?

Jason Lowery: I think it was Hal.

Danny Knowles: I think it was Hal, yeah.

Jason Lowery: "In case it catches on".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "This could go to $100 million.  In case it catches on, you might as well get some".  It's the exact same point.

Jason Lowery: So here I am, a student at this school, and I'm just like, "Okay, well this is an interesting theory".  At the very least, it's an interesting conversation.  If I'm wrong, who cares?  People will forget, it doesn't matter.  But if I'm right, this is a national, strategic security imperative.  Then that is my fiduciary responsibility, as the National Defence Fellow at MIT, to see it and to say something.

Peter McCormack: And so what kind of progress have you made?  Are you making real progress now?

Jason Lowery: Yeah. 

Peter McCormack: Can you tell us any of it? 

Jason Lowery: I have publicly said that I'm advising the White House.  Let's see how well that sounds!

Peter McCormack: So flash, "I'm advising the White House!"

Jason Lowery: Well no, I was saying clearly that's not working well.  I've publicly said I've been invited to, I haven't started, to advise the Strategic Technology Office for DARPA.  I've publicly said that I was green-lighted by a Joint Chief, who's now becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then there's a whole bunch of other pretty much just any organisation tied to defence.  They're at least like, "Oh, that's interesting, I haven't thought about that". 

The goal is to get to the point where -- because we know what's happening, you see it.  The people who do not want Bitcoin to succeed are pushing a big ESG narrative to make it politically difficult to overcome.  It's politically unpalpable to say Bitcoin is good because of all the propaganda that it's killing the environment.  At the same time, you clearly see that the people who don't want Bitcoin to succeed are building this NatSec FUD too, National Security FUD.  So you got ESG FUD, you got the NatSec FUD. 

One way to chop that off at the pass, to cut that flank, is to have the US National Security Fellow, who was paid for by the Congress and by the DOD to advise the DOD on this exact subject, to produce his technical analysis of this thing, to testify in front of the Congress about this, because business people, bankers least of all, are qualified to be talking about the national, strategic security implications of physical defence technology.  They can talk about coins all they want.  They can't talk about defence technology.  So if you simply reframe it, then you kill the crypto people, you kill the ESG FUD, you kill the credentials of all these people with blatant conflicts of interest that don't want this thing to succeed. 

Then you put me, the guy, saying, "This is the most important thing.  We must buy this, we must be supportive of this, we cannot afford to tax the crap out of hashers, we cannot afford to push this industry outwards".  In my opinion, this is my way of fulfilling my fiduciary responsibility to my nation as a military officer, as a US National Defence Fellow.  And by the way, I obviously think I'm right.  I don't know if I am, it's just a theory; all things start with theories.  But if I am right, then holy shit, I have to say this, I have to be vocal about this. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It is, if you're a hammer, then everything's a nail.

Jason Lowery: Let me talk about that!

Peter McCormack: By the way, Danny made me say it! 

Jason Lowery: Okay, let me talk about that.  Let's say 98% of the population hasn't served, doesn't know anything about physical security, doesn't devote their career to this, and someone invents a nail.  Okay, 98% of the population are a bunch of screwdrivers, someone invents a nail.  Even the person who invented the nail is a screwdriver and calls it a screw.  Everyone's looking at this nail, all these screwdrivers, 98% of everyone in the population is looking at this nail but calling it a screw because they don't know what a nail looks like, they're not trained in this thing. 

The hammer comes in and looks at all the screwdrivers and says, "You guys realise this is a hammer, right?  This is clearly a physical security system.  This is clearly a new way for humans to project power to physically secure, to physically constrain, to physically cause prohibitive cost, just in a new domain without three-dimensional space and no mass.  It's going to revolutionise the field of security, of warfare, of cybersecurity, of national security".  It is to the benefit of these screwdrivers that they hear that from the hammer. 

If only 2% of the population are hammers, are people with experience in this field, in this profession of war fighting, then one, we know that the population is predisposed to not recognising the hammer when it comes in, and also that the population should listen to the hammer when he says this, at least indulge him for a second and think through first principles and hear him out.  That's why I really liked you because when everyone else was yelling at me on Twitter, you took me seriously.  You sat me down, you bought me steak, and you listened to me.  You didn't make judgments. 

Peter McCormack: Well, hold on, hold on, let's dial back a second.  I was invited to dinner, and I always pay for dinner.  So I didn't invite you to steak, Greg Foss did, I bought you dinner.  I have a different role from a lot of people and my role is to try and see where the value is and give everyone fair time if they deserve it.  I just saw you kind of getting into fights, and kept thinking, "Stop blocking people, stop arguing", just because I wanted the clarity of what you were saying. 

My problem was, when you fight people, the people you're fighting, I don't then get clarity from them because I'm not sure if they're arguing with you because they're in a fight or because they completely disagree with you.  And so, look, we took a long time to get here and the right amount of time.  Look, some people are going to listen to this and they're going to be like, "What the fuck are you on about, Pete, he's talking nonsense?"  Others are going to go, "Oh, this was helpful".  And that is just the way I've got to do it.  But I try and listen to everyone, and I think that's the right way to do it when you're sat in this seat.

Jason Lowery: But if it's a nail, then you want the hammer to see it as a nail, when everyone will not recognise it because they're screwdrivers.  So, indulge me for a second, and let me perhaps provide some value from a different point of view, just like everyone else from their other experiences provide their point of view on this thing.  Though, at the end of the day, at least we had an interesting conversation, at least you thought about it differently, maybe you learned a couple of random facts that you didn't learn.

Peter McCormack: I'm more interested in how Danny feels now.

Danny Knowles: I think I totally understand where you're coming from now and I get why you try and frame it this way.  I don't know whether I still accept the framing of it as warfare, but I mean, who am I to say?  I just think I prefer to look at Bitcoin as the peaceful revolution, a completely opt-in, voluntary, rules-based system that is not imposing any threat on anyone.  That's definitely my perspective on Bitcoin.  But I do understand why you're framing it this way, and I think it will be useful to probably a lot of people.

Peter McCormack: And this is why I think it's interesting, I even almost framed it at the start.  I think you see the same imperative not to screw this up as I do, as you do, as Troy Cross said at the start of my film.  We all see it and we all see the same decisions they should be making, we've just come around it in a different way that we understand the world and what it is.  And so, the whole Jason Lowery Softwar thing is, it's Jason Lowery's way of understanding Bitcoin and the world, in the world of people you operate with, and that makes sense to me.

Jason Lowery: Yeah.  Can I mention, because I think we have a little bit of extra time, can I mention the blocking thing, because you mentioned it multiple times?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, look, yeah, okay.  I think you block too many people.

Jason Lowery: Okay.  So before the blocking campaigns, I publicly announced, "I'm going to be doing a blocking campaign", because I'm trying to illustrate the way that social media can be exploited.  And so for this last campaign, I've done this now multiple times, people don't see it, because you only see what's on your feed, right?  So, this last time I did it, I was like, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do".  The principle of homophily, which is the principle of birds of a feather flocking together, people tend to like to hang around with people that they have similar interests in; homophily. 

The way that most social media networks work is they recommend feeds to you, things to show on your feed, based off of your friends and what your friends like; not what you like, based off what your friends like. 

Peter McCormack: Not always.  Sometimes it's what they think you like, what your friends like.  I think there's a range of things. 

Jason Lowery: So Twitter and Facebook, they know who your friends are.  They're tracking what your friends are liking and your feed includes the things that your friends like, because they're preying on, or not preying, that's a bad word --

Peter McCormack: They see that as a signal that you might like it, yeah, okay.

Jason Lowery: Homophily.  You're more likely to this thing and be happy that this was on your feed and have the dopamine hit because your friends who think you through homophily liked it and had the dopamine hit.  There's also another phenomenon, especially on Twitter, it's called the J-curve phenomenon, where if you're on a public forum, just a random sample of people in just a city, and I say something controversial or just any position on anything, you'll see probably a normal distribution curve where there's a lot of people who like it, or there's a little bit of people who it, there's a little bit of people who hate it, but in the middle of the bell curve, most people just don't give a shit about what you have to say.  Public forum in the real world, three-dimensional space, that's how it works. 

In social media, there's a J-curve where instead of a bell curve, it's a J-curve.  So on the side of the people who like what you just said, who agree with it or passionately agree with it, it's kind of higher but a little lower, so it's the small, short part of the J.  There's a smaller amount of people who will like or retweet your thing because they agree with it, or engage it in a way, maybe not like or retweet, but just engage it, view it, read it, okay?  Most people will not have any reaction at all, will not engage your tweets, regardless of what you say. 

But then if you say something controversial, if you say something that pisses people off, you'll get the tall part of the J.  So many people will like, comment, retweet, talk crap, stay on that screen, right?  And so, the way that Twitter works is they take advantage of homophily, they recommend stuff to you based off what your friends like and engage with, but they take advantage of the J-curve.  They recommend stuff to you based off what your friends are pissed off about, what they're most engaging with, which is through the virtue of the J-curve, what gets them talking.  It's the controversial stuff. 

Peter McCormack: Which is why Twitter's hellscape. 

Jason Lowery: Yeah, it is.  So what if I want to exploit that; what if I want you to talk about me?  I want people to see that I have just produced the book.  Controversial books sell great, a lot better than books that no one's talking crap about.  So I upfront, transparently, publicly say, "This is what I'm going to do.  I am going to block anyone who likes or retweets a complaint about being blocked by me", or that's usually what I did last time.  If I do that, I simultaneously take advantage of the J-curve and homophily at the same time. 

So what happens is -- by the way, the first time I did it intentionally, the second time I saw the opportunity, I can't remember who it was.  It was Hodlnaut, or someone.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Jason Lowery: Someone said something really bad, or it just pissed me off, and so I blocked him.  And then Hodlnaut doubled down and said, "Why did you block that guy?" and I was like, "Hodlnaut, I deleted the tweet because he misunderstood it.  Just move on.  But if you're going to double down on this, then I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to basically shill the book".  I told him this explicitly.  I'm publicly tweeting, "Hey, I'm going to do this again because I already showed you how this can be exploited, just to illustrate one of the core principles of the book, which is how your feeds and information flow can be systemically exploited.  People are network targeting you through your homophily".  I was like, "If you do it again, I'm going to do it again", and so he was like, "Okay, fine".

So, every single person who liked or retweeted Hodlnaut's post about me being pissed off that I blocked some person, I blocked them.  Through principles of homophily, that means that those people are the most likely to make their own posts that are pissed off about me blocking them.  So I find those, because you can just search your name, and if you liked another post about being blocked by me, I block you too, I block you too.  That's how Troy Cross got blocked.  That's how several people, you know, I was indiscriminate about doing it.  In fact, the higher the follower count that complains about me being blocked, or being blocked by me says something, the more views, the more likes, the more I can target that network. 

What I've done is I've effectively targeted this network of people who just are mad that they got blocked by me specifically, and I've now caused a behaviour, I've gotten all of you to talk about me.  And then I was like, "Now look at my orders on Amazon".  And I showed how I doubled it instantly.  And I did this publicly and I told everyone about it.  You didn't see it because it's not on your feed!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I did.  I saw people saying, "I've been blocked, I haven't even engaged with him".

Jason Lowery: You saw people complaining about being blocked by me, you didn't see me saying, "Hey, I'm going to run this experiment again to show you how you can be taken advantage of and exploited.  I can cause a behaviour where you will talk about me and I'll create a controversy out of nothing".

Peter McCormack: I think it's net negative.  I wouldn't do it again.  Personally, I'd just unblock all those people. 

Jason Lowery: Well, I did each time.

Jason Lowery: I think the bigger goal here is, you could have done a few podcasts and doubled your sales, or you could have had public discussions and doubled your sales.  There's probably other ways you could have done it.  I just think it's unhelpful.  I'm blocked by so many people, and I wish I wasn't, because I've just been a dick at certain times, or sometimes a whole different opinion, like I talk about guns in ways people don't like, but whatever.  What I'm saying is, it's really annoying, because there's some people I don't want to have.  I'd rather be having the conversation with them, than just us blocked, even if I don't agree with them.

Jason Lowery: Let's talk about negatives and stuff that, because I think it's the opposite, maybe, in some cases.  So first of all, everyone who was blocked was unblocked, each time I do it.  I block them, I unblock them three days later.  And so the people who are complaining about being blocked, some of them were complaining multiple times.  It didn't register in their heads that they've been blocked, unblocked, and blocked again and now they're complaining about it twice. 

Peter McCormack: It just seems such a waste of energy.  It's almost like cheap marketing.  What I'm saying is --

Jason Lowery: No, it is cheap marketing, yeah. 

Peter McCormack: But you're this military guy in Space Force working on this big, detailed Bitcoin plan.  You've done this book that a lot of people have highly recommended and like, and then you're running a cheap marketing scam.  It's like, the two don't align for me. 

Jason Lowery: The book is about the dangers of being systemically exploited through your software.  I am demonstrating how and why you can be systemically exploited, I can cause you to do something, I can get all these people to talk about me simply by pressing a block button, by network targeting you, you are being exploited this way all the time, you're complaining about it because Elon's doing it.  I'm showing you how it happens, I'm explaining transparently how it happens.  Yeah, I get this reputation of being this a-hole who blocks people until they listen to these conversations and they realise, "Oh, okay, he actually has an interesting point and he's actually illustrating the core principle of his book".

Peter McCormack: But that's not guaranteed.  Some people will go, "I'm not even going to bother fucking listening", or other people will say, they're going to listen to it, but already have a built-in bias.  I mean, look, you've done it now.  I'm just saying, look, I've messaged you a few times, I've said, "I don't think you should do this".  I think you've done the test now.  I think the important thing is to test the thesis, that's the bit now, like is it right, is it wrong?  I've done what I think I can do, which is help you explain it.  Now you need to do the conversations with the people who will challenge you, which is not really my role in this world, and I think you need the bigger audience for that.  That's just my personal opinion.

Jason Lowery: I mean, I don't intend to anymore, but the opportunity came up.  And so I was like, okay, well I already did one demonstration.  Now can I show to the audience of people who actually follow me and listen to these conversations, can I show these people that it is a repeatable thing?  So before I started, I said, "This is what I'm going to do, and this is what's going to happen".  So now I've shown to my audience, this is a repeatable exploitation.  I can do this, which means everyone in control of all your feeds can do this to you.  They are causing a behaviour, they know how to do it by network targeting you.  Yeah, haters are going to hate me no matter what.  Are they going to double hate me because they get blocked?  I don't care.

Peter McCormack: No, but I think you're feeding a tribe of people to come and hate you that maybe wouldn't have before.  Listen, we can go around in circles on that.  I just care about the content, the explanation of the content, the testing of content, the testing of the thesis; that's what I care about.  I now want to hear you.  I'm going to go back and listen to the Marty one again because I listened the first time, but now I've got this framing I want to re-listen to that and see what he said.  But this was interesting.  How long did we just do?

Danny Knowles: It's nearly two-and-a-half hours.

Peter McCormack: It's our longest show in ages.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Anything else you want to talk about; anything I didn't raise that you wish I had?

Jason Lowery: No, I just really appreciate this conversation.  I've wanted to have this conversation with you ever since that dinner.  I'm so happy that you invited me on.  I hope that people watching this can at least, if they've listened this long, appreciate a different point of view.  You don't have to subscribe to it if you don't want to, but at least this is what I think, this is my way, as weird as it is, to contribute to the space.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  All right, Softwar, check it out, available on Amazon.  You need an audible version.

Jason Lowery: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You need to do that.

Jason Lowery: People have done AI audible versions.  I did it.  I did a reading of the first introductory, and more people are buying the book than are listening to the free me reading it. 

Peter McCormack: But that's because it's a free intro, they want the whole thing.  I don't know, I don't know what's involved.  Listen, let's do this again, let's give it a few months, let's revisit, let's see the feedback, let's look at the next steps.  There's a whole bunch of other shit I want to get to.  I didn't even talk about aliens with you; I wanted to talk about aliens with you!  We will get back into that.  Thank you for coming on, appreciate you coming in.

Danny Knowles: Good effort.