| Dear Hiveans | Liebe Hiver | Queridos Hiveanos |
|---|---|---|
| Today I'd like to share my favourite excerpts from the book "Softwar" (goodreads) by Jason Lowery who is a US National Defense Fellow at MIT and astronautical engineer on active duty with the US Space Force. | Heute meine Lieblingsauszüge aus dem Buch "Softwar" (goodreads) von Jason Lowery, einem US National Defense Fellow am MIT und Astronautikingenieur im aktiven Dienst der US Space Force. | Hoy me gustaría compartir mis extractos favoritos del libro "Softwar" (goodreads) de Jason Lowery, becario de Defensa Nacional en el MIT e ingeniero astronáutico en servicio activo en las Fuerzas Espaciales de Estados Unidos. |
Bitcoin could represent a strategically vital national security technology for the digital age. However, the American public may not understand why Bitcoin has the potential to be so strategically important because they don’t appear to understand the complexity of (1) the computer theory behind the design concept called “proof-of-work,” (2) modern power projection tactics, (3) the function of militaries, or (4) the profession of warfighting. If the theories presented in this thesis prove to be valid, then the American public’s lack of understanding about these core concepts could jeopardize US national strategic security. The future of US national strategic security hinges upon cyber security, and Bitcoin has demonstrated that “proof-of-work” functions as a new type of cyber security system. Nations appear to be waking up to the potentially substantial strategic benefits of Bitcoin and learning that it could be in their best strategic interest to adopt it (hence Russian’s recent 180-degree pivot to supporting Bitcoin). Another cold war could be kicking off, except instead of a space race, it could be a cyber space race. As is often the case with the emergence of any new power projection technology, speed of adoption may be critical.
Four National Strategic Security Hazards
One thing slowing society from adopting emerging power projection technologies is a general lack of knowledge about the profession of warfighting. Some people simply don’t have enough experience or understanding with the basics of physical security to make the connection and encourage rapid adoption. This makes sense considering how less than 2% of people actively participate in this profession. Warfare is a niche field of expertise that almost everyone in society outsources to people like the author.
Another barrier is pacifism. Some people are perfectly capable of understanding the potential strategic implications of a new technology, but they have a hard time accepting it because of moral, ethical, or ideological objections. Pacifism slowed the development of both air forces and space forces and was especially prevalent amongst civil scientists during the first decade of nuclear warhead development.
A third barrier preventing society from adopting strategically vital new power projection technology is analytical bias. Sometimes, people aren’t aware of how biased their analysis of a given technology is because they don’t recognize their assumption that the first intended use case of a given technology is the most important or even the most relevant use case. For example, when alchemists first started to theorize about the medicinal risks and benefits of black powder, they were inadvertently biased because they only analyzed the first intended use case. They weren’t aware of the assumptions they were making – namely the assumption that black powder was strictly a form of medicine that couldn’t be useful for several other applications.
A fourth barrier is cognitive dissonance. Sometimes, people can see the existentially important national strategic security implications of emerging technologies, but they struggle to accept and reconcile what they see because it contradicts their preconceptions. Faulty preconceptions can be caused by phenomena already discussed, like a lack warfighting expertise, ideological objections, or analytical bias, but they can also happen due to fear, shock, or even pride. In plain terms, change is scary, and it’s easier on the emotions to ignore or discredit the threat because we don’t like the way it feels to be threatened (especially if we’ve become too accustomed to being the top dog).
The point is that no empire is safe from technological disruption. It's strategically essential for populations not to allow fear, shock, hubris, or complacency, or sunken cost fallacies slow their adoption of important new power projection technologies when they emerge. Speed of adoption has always been critical. This is especially true when factoring in how severe and highly path-dependent the consequences can be if vital new power projection technologies aren’t adopted quickly. Military leaders especially must hold none of their expertise in existing power projection tactics, techniques, and technologies too sacred, because winning strategies can change as quickly and as often as the technological environment changes, and there’s no doubt that our technological environment is changing rapidly in the digital age, perhaps more rapidly than in any other time in the history of human warfighting.
If the public is suffering from systemic-level analytical bias or they’re struggling to reconcile cognitive dissonance associated with a potentially disruptive power projection technology, this barrier can be mitigated by raising more awareness and educating the public. To that end, the primary justification for this research is to provide more information about the possible national strategic security implications of an emerging power projection technology called Bitcoin. A simple definition of Bitcoin is that it’s the world’s most widely-adopted open-source proof-of-work computer protocol to date. Proof-of-work is a new type of computing protocol which enables users to keep cyber resources (i.e. software and the corresponding bits of information managed by that software) secure against attacks not just by using encoded logical constraints, but by imposing severe physical costs on the computers. Whereas most computer systems only use encoded logical constraints to keep themselves secure against systemic exploitation (i.e. hacking), proof-of-work systems like Bitcoin use real-world physical power (i.e. watts) to keep cyber resources physically secure against attack by imposing severe physical costs (as measured in watts) on belligerent actors. Based on a theoretical framework developed and presented in this thesis called “Power Projection Theory,” the author hypothesizes that Bitcoin is not strictly a monetary technology, but the world’s first globally-adopted “softwar” protocol that could transform the nature of power projection in the digital age and possibly even represent a vital national strategic priority for US citizens to adopt as quickly as possible.
| Proof of work is the most important part of Bitcoin, not "blockchain". | Proof of work ist der wichtigste Teil von Bitcoin, nicht die "Blockchain". | Proof-of-work es la parte más importante de Bitcoin, no "blockchain". |
In the early 1800s, General Clausewitz examined the nature of war and defined it as a trinity with 3 distinct characteristics. First, war is comprised of the same "blind natural forces" of "primordial violence" observed in nature. Second, war contains "the play of chance and probability" rewarding "creative spirits." Third, war is an instrument of national policy used to resolve political disputes.
[...] But why would nations prefer something as lethal and destructive as warfare to resolve international policy disputes when they have a far more energy-efficient option of peaceful adjudication through a court? The answer is quite simple: because they don't trust, respect, or sympathize with the court. To borrow a concept from an anonymous software engineer, the root problem with peace is all the trust that's required to make it work.
The intent of law is noble, but for reasons that are exhaustively explored in this thesis, the inegalitarian and trust-based nature of law-based social structures make them systemically insecure, hence every corrupt or oppressive government to have ever existed. Law-based societies are prone to reaching a hazardous state over time, leading to substantial losses for their populations. Perhaps the ruling class finds a reason to systemically exploit the law, creating a state of oppression. Perhaps the ruled class finds a reason to stop following the law, creating anarchy. Perhaps a neighboring nation finds a reason to be unsympathetic to their neighbor’s laws, creating an invasion. 5,000 years of written testimony about law-based societies makes one thing very clear: they become dysfunctional over time.
When law-based societies inevitably break down, war typically follows. Like law, war has its own tradeoffs. War is highly energy-intensive and destructive, but it’s also egalitarian. Physical power makes no distinction between the ruling and ruled class; a king suffers the same from a sword through the heart as a peasant (across history, kings and other high-ranking people especially have a habit of losing their heads after losing wars). War is also zero-trust; it doesn’t require trust to function properly. War is also unsympathetic to people’s belief systems, thus completely impartial to them. Therefore, physical power competitions work the same regardless of what people believe and whether people are sympathetic to it.
Here we can see that law and war are remarkably complementary to each other in the sense that they represent almost perfectly opposite approaches to achieving the same ends. Together, they form an interdependent system with opposing tradeoffs. Law is an energy-efficient and non-destructive way for society to settle disputes and establish a dominance hierarchy, but it requires people to adopt common belief systems that are highly inegalitarian and trust-based, making them demonstrably vulnerable to systemic exploitation and abuse. On the other hand, war is an energy-intensive and destructive way for society to settle disputes and establish a dominance hierarchy, but it doesn’t require people to adopt a common belief system. and it’s also egalitarian and zero-trust, making it practically invulnerable to systemic exploitation and abuse. These are the tradeoffs that are weighed when settling policy disputes.
Another explanation for why physical power is so useful is because it is virtually unlimited and relatively easy to access. There are hard limits to the amount of rank, votes, and social status that a person can obtain within their chosen belief system, and these imaginary forms of power are fickle, nepotistic, and inegalitarian. It takes a lot of time and effort to ascend existing dominance hierarchies. High-ranking positions are often unavailable across multiple generations. It’s far easier and more achievable to simply change the existing dominance hierarchy than to climb through the ranks of the existing one.
Physical power is very different. There is virtually no limit to the amount of physical power that people can summon to shape, enforce, and secure the policies they value. Physical power is accessible via one’s own ingenuity and merit as opposed to rank or social status. People also tend to respect physical power more because of how self-evident it is. Physical power is proof of its own merit; it doesn’t need anyone to believe in it to know its worthiness. This is in stark contrast to rank and social status, which are both part of abstract, artificial, and inegalitarian belief systems which are incontrovertibly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse from those who have the most rank and social status.
… Despite how unpopular it is to talk about the benefits of war, it could be useful to at least take the time to understand what those benefits are, so that we can understand why it keeps happening. Endeavoring to understand the benefits of war could help us learn how to design systems that minimize our need for those benefits. Alternatively, endeavoring to understand the benefits of war could help us gain insights about ways to wage it better, perhaps in “softer” ways that are farless destructive. In the author’s opinion, understanding the merit of war is key to understanding the merit of new technologies like Bitcoin.
- Very interesting.
If society were to invent a soft form of international warfighting, the tradeoff between law and war would likely remain the same. War would still represent a more energy-intensive way to settle disputes and establish a dominance hierarchy over limited resources than law would be. But a soft form of warfare would only burn watts electronically, not kinetically. It would therefore have profoundly different emergent behavior – a major one being its non-destructive side effects. [...] Now consider the potential emergent effects of soft war on humanity. Imagine if this new type of war machine accelerated the development of faster computers and more abundant energy infrastructure. Imagine if the economies of scale for that electric power infrastructure could be shared worldwide with everyone who participated. Meanwhile, this would theoretically be possible while preserving a non-lethal option for preserving zero-trust and permissionless control over valuable resources, like international property (e.g. money) and international policy (e.g. monetary policy).
Prior to the release of Bitcoin, academic consensus was that proof-of-work protocols were cyber security protocols that could be used to stop common types of cyber attacks like denial-of-service attacks or sybil attacks. Computer scientists discussed how proof-of-work protocols could be used as a foundation for achieving consensus on decentralized and permissionless networks. But after the release of operational proof-of-work protocols, the primary topic of academic conversation changed from cyber security to money.
“The most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries
where power is exercised… subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology...”
The Sovereign individual
Power Projection Theory lays the groundwork for understanding why physical strength and intelligence is so intrinsically valuable in the wild, and why it’s often used as the basis for settling disputes, managing limited resources, and establishing intraspecies dominance hierarchies (a.k.a. pecking order). Nature has an incontrovertible bias towards its strongest and most intelligent organisms. Animals which master their capacity and inclination to project physical power in increasingly clever ways tend to prosper better in the wild than animals which don’t. In other words, the strong and the aggressive often survive. The weak and the docile often don’t. There must be an explanation for this – an explanation which could provide some insight into why humans project power, settle disputes, and manage resources the way they do. This explanation could help shed light on why emerging power projection tactics, techniques, and technologies like Bitcoin are so remarkable.
Proof-of-Power is Proof-of-Ownership
Since the dawn of life on Earth, organisms have evolved increasingly more creative ways to project physical power to settle property disputes, secure control authority over resources, achieve consensus on the state of ownership and chain of custody of property, and establish dominance hierarchies (a.k.a. pecking order). The control authority over Earth’s natural resources that many plants and animals enjoy today appears to be the byproduct of energy exerted over time (joules/sec). This would imply that property ownership’s physical signature can, in fact, be measured or denominated in watts. Watts signal ownership. We can determine organisms believe they own based not on what they say, but on what they do – how they project their watts. When an organism decides to stop owning a resource, they stop spending the watts needed to maintain their access to it. Perhaps an organism stops spending watts because their priorities changed; perhaps it simply doesn’t value the resource anymore.
- If no energy is expended, entropy sets in.
It is incontrovertibly true that all organisms rely heavily on physical power to achieve inter and intra species consensus on the ownership status of limited resources. Even for sapiens, Earth’s master abstract thinkers, physical power is still the primary means through which they settle territory disputes and resolve conflicting abstract beliefs about property rights. They write rules of law to define property rights, but then they use physical power to solve disputes about what the “legitimate” rule of law is, or what the “right” property rights should be. While there are many examples in everyday life where law successfully settles human intraspecies property disputes, what people often overlook is the long history of physical disputes that were used to instantiate those laws (in other words, our property rights exist because of the wars fought to establish those property rights). … Without physical power, resources are either perceived to be unclaimed (therefore not property), or resource ownership is purely an abstract construct that manifests as a belief system – belief systems which can be ignored, exploited, or considered illegitimate.
To illustrate how physical power is used to signal property ownership, consider a scenario where the reader attempts to take freshly hunted meat (a precious physical resource) from a wolf. The wolf would likely signal her ownership of that resource by projecting physical power. She would accomplish this by displaying her capacity and willingness to impose severe physical costs on the reader for trying to deny her access to the meat. This proof-of-power display would probably look something like [this].
The wolf’s capacity and willingness to impose severe physical costs on the reader to secure her access to the meat is displayed via her snarl, and it would likely leave a clear impression on the reader. Two things should be noted about this display. The first is that her power projection capacity is physically quantifiable. With the right combination of sensors, we could measure her capacity to project power in watts. The second thing to note about this display is the fact that those watts are the only independently verifiable and objective signal of ownership based in physical reality.
[…] The proof-of-power protocol for property ownership is energy-intensive and prone to causing injury, but it has many positive tradeoffs. The main benefits of the proof-of-power ownership protocol is that it’s a zero-trust, egalitarian, and permissionless protocol. Proof-of-power is zero-trust because it doesn’t require trust to function properly. It works the same regardless of whether organisms are trustworthy and sympathetic to our beliefs or not. Proof-of-power is egalitarian because all organisms are equally subordinate to watts. Proof-of-power is also permissionless; the wolf doesn’t need to ask for permission from the animal it hunts to take its meat – her physical power gives her the freedom to do what she wants.
Another major benefit of the proof-of-power ownership protocol is that it’s exogenous to belief systems. Ownership of the meat passed from the prey to which it originally belonged to the wolf who hunted it down for no other reason than because the wolf projected physical power to gain and maintain access to the meat. She doesn’t own the meat because she believes she should own the meat. Beliefs don’t put dinner on the table; physical power does. The wolf’s continual projection of physical power is why she continues to own the meat. If she were to stop displaying proof-of-power to signal proof-of-ownership of the meat, then she would likely lose her access to the meat regardless of what she believes she owns.
Now imagine if you picked up the meat, the wolf snarled at you, and you doubled down and snarled back at her. You and the wolf would produce two conflicting signals of ownership because you’re both projecting power. In this situation, it wouldn’t be clear to neighboring organisms who truly owns the meat. To resolve this property dispute and achieve consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of the meat, more physical power would need to be applied to the situation.
To Live is to Convert Chaos into Structure, and to use it to Fight for Every Inch
“In any fight, it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch.” Tony D’Amato, Any Given Sunday
The emergent behavior of life is something remarkable. By projecting lots of physical power to capture and secure access to resources, life is miraculously able to turn the inexorable chaos of the Universe into something more structured. It then leverages that structure to exert more physical power to capture more resources and convert those resources into even more structure. Life owes its existence and prosperity to this process. Few things are as aligned with the fundamental nature of all living things than this physical power projection process through which organisms and secure access to resources and then use those resources to build additional structures, for no other discernable reason than to simply improve its ability to countervail entropy and survive a little longer.
Higher BCRA organisms are more vulnerable to attack than lower BCRA organisms because they offer a higher return on investment for hungry neighbors. Organisms therefore have an existential imperative to lower their BCRA as much as they can afford to do so by increasing their capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on neighboring organisms.
Environments tend to change, however – sometimes quickly. They become congested; they fill up with a lot of other organisms. When environments become more congested, they become more contested; organisms increasingly oppose one another’s attempts to access the same limited resources. As environments become more contested, they become more competitive; organisms seek to gain an advantage over each other. While all of this is happening, environments remain intrinsically hostile; entropy is a constant, looming threat. And if entropy doesn’t attempt to kill an organism, a hungry neighbor will undoubtedly try to devour it. Add these factors together and we get the type of environment all organisms live in today: congested, contested, competitive, and hostile (CCCH) environments.
Some might say predation is a negative phenomenon because of how murderous and fratricidal it appears to be. This assertion is based purely on human ideology. From a systemic perspective, predation has benefits for life. In sufficient moderation, predation acts like a filter that weeds out life’s most unfit and unadaptable organisms. By passing organisms through this filter, life revectors Earth’s precious limited resources away from its worst prosperity-margin growers towards its best prosperity-margin-growers,
consequently buying more prosperity margin for life as a whole. In other words, the stronger and more adaptable organisms become, the stronger and more adaptable life itself becomes at surviving on Earth.
- Unpleasant, but probably true.
Without predation, lifeforms might operate on something like a “first come, first serve” or “finders
keepers” basis of resource management. A lack of predation would mean that organisms automatically gain monopolies on the nutrient-abundant territory they discover because they are uncontested. Regardless of how strong, resourceful, or adaptable they are, the first to arrive at a resource would automatically be allowed to have monopoly control of that resource by virtue of their being unchallenged. Without the competitive stress of predation, these organisms would have far fewer external motivators to become stronger, more resourceful, and more adaptable. In other words, without predation, there would be nothing but unimpeachable, centralized, monopoly control over precious resources.
- So predation (and violence?) is necessary to prevent everlasting monopoly over precious resources?
Appreciating nature requires recognizing up front that most organisms are sociopaths. Nature has no apparent capacity to see, understand, or care about sapient theology, philosophy, or ideology. Moral “good” is a highly subjective and abstract construct which exists in an ontologically different category than the study of nature (this is further explained in the following chapter). Therefore, to better understand nature, it’s useful to ignore human belief systems about right or wrong, fair or unfair, moral or immoral. These topics are almost irrelevant to the subject of natural selection and survival.
| "most organisms are sociopaths" - I have little doubt about that. | "Die meisten Organismen sind Soziopathen" - daran habe ich wenig Zweifel. | "la mayoría de los organismos son sociópatas" - Tengo pocas dudas al respecto. |
As sapiens have shown multiple times across thousands of years of randomized experimentation in multiple different environments with at least forty different species of animals of multiple different classes (mammals, birds, and even fishes), slight adjustments to the way animal packs feed and breed the strongest and most physically aggressive members of their pack leads to substantial differences in their ability to keep themselves secure against predators. The domestication of animals offers a large data set with conclusive evidence to show that there is a direct, causally inferable relationship between an animal’s capacity and inclination to be physically aggressive, and their capacity to survive, prosper, and live freely.
The less an animal is inclined to impose severe physical costs on their neighbors, the easier they are to be systemically exploited and led straight to slaughter.
In the mammalian class, males often have higher testosterone levels, contributing to sexual dimorphism and making them physically stronger and more aggressive members of the pack. Sexual dimorphism is a feature that sapiens learned how to exploit. To change the “feed and breed the powerful first” pecking order heuristic employed by mammalian pack animals, sapiens learned how to neuter the strongest and most physically aggressive males to remove their genes from the gene pool. This tactic is given polite-sounding names like selective breeding, but what it represents from a sociotechnical (and honest) perspective is a way to force a species to become less physically powerful and aggressive through genetic modifications, therefore less capable of and inclined to impose severe physical costs on us, their oppressors. Domestication is a form of predation; it’s a power projection tactic that has dramatically reshaped our world and placed sapiens at the top of the global interspecies dominance hierarchy. Wild mammals which have had their pecking order strategy exploited via domestication are called livestock. Wild birds which have had their pecking order strategy exploited via domestication are called poultry. Today, the biomass of domesticated livestock is comprised mostly of cattle and pigs and is about 14X higher than the biomass of the rest of the world’s non-domesticated wild mammals combined. The biomass of domesticated poultry is about 3X higher than the biomass of the rest of the world’s wild birds combined (it’s harder to domesticate birds because they can fly away, hence why most poultry are flightless or nearly flightless birds).
- Fascinating.
When populations become less inclined to impose severe physical costs on attackers, they become less safe, less secure, and less free.
The domestication of animals has proven to be a very effective power projection tactic. In other words, domestication is a highly effective form of predation. This is important for the reader to understand because if domestication represents a systemic security risk to the freedom and prosperity of 40 different animal species, then domestication has the potential to threaten sapiens too. Not only is there a systemic danger of self-domestication, but domestication itself is a form of attack against human society. Remove society’s capacity and implication to impose severe physical costs on other humans, and that will have a direct and measurable effect on their ability to survive. Human societies therefore have a fiduciary responsibility to themselves to not allow themselves to become too self-domesticated. Societies who are interested in survival should not allow themselves to become less capable of and inclined to be physically aggressive to potential attackers or oppressors.
| It's a long book, and I will follow up with more excerpts. | Es ist ein langes Buch, und ich werde weitere Auszüge nachreichen. | Es un libro largo, y seguiré con más extractos. |
Have a great day,
zuerich
