Oddbean new post about login | logout The Bitcoin protocol is plugging in at the bottom of the internet tech stack. Any valuable part of the legacy internet architecture we want to port over and strangle from the legacy system can be done. Financial services was an obvious first use case. But the bits of information secured by proof-of-work can represent any information. They are literally just bits of information that are physically costly because the state space in which they "exist" was designed to be small and more physically constrained.
I’m an engineer. Give me concrete implementation details. Love the softwar theory but can’t see how it actually is implemented. Hand waved theorems are good. Lots of things started that way but I need some code to work with. Or a concrete example.
One very concrete example is signing totally uncensorable messages, i.e. securing your first amendment right to speak openly and freely. Securing the freedom of information flow in cyberspace.
Fair. I don’t follow the weapon thesis then. For background I spent 11yrs 4mo and 3 days working for DoD in the Intel Community at strategic and tactical levels.
If at the core of our system and its power is the money system it uses, using another system outside of its control is war on the system
🤔
#Bitcoin ASICs are human-out-of-the-loop warfighting drones engaged in a non-lethal probabilistic physical power competition to determine the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of the underlying resource and the privilege of authoring the next block. This enables humanity to use a non-lethal warfare protocol to establish their intraspecies dominance hierarchy. 🤷♂️
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Have to admit I didn't read full the OP... because humans, culture is the only constant on power and warfar, the original programing. What you, primordial, propose (inferring from other parts of this post) will lead to a Borg like scenario, because power. But it will also fail because entropy, there must be a counter balance to hold, like others mentioned "meat space". A hammer or a sun going supernova you can not escape, just enjoy the day that you have and love as much as you you can.
The weapon thesis is we use physical power to secure every other domain of objective physical reality. We are now using physical power to secure cyberspace.
I understand that. How does one attack with bitcoin?
One doesn’t. This whole idea that bitcoin is a weapon (which was walked back by lowry) is nonsense. An honest decentralized ledger is not ‘power projection’ that will take your enemies down. Watch the TFTC podcast with Jason, he couldn’t come up with one example of how bitcoin’s hashrate secures anything other than bitcoin. He claims that somehow putting info behind a bitcoin paywall is revolutionary. Very skeptical about the whole thing. Lopp has a good article responding to his thesis.
How you should think about it is simply in terms of physical security. Not necessarily offense or defense. The physically costly bits of information secured by proof-of-work can be used to drastically increase the cost of attacking your computer network to the point where it's literally too physically costly for any attackers to even attempt attacking. A weapon can be either passive or active physical power projection. A wall is technically a passive physical power projection weapon. People think in terms of offense and defense.. but the right way to think of it is passive and active tactics, techniques, and technologies that allow you to achieve physical security.
> The physically costly bits of information secured by proof-of-work can be used to drastically increase the cost of attacking your computer network to the point where it's literally too physically costly for any attackers to even attempt attacking. What bits are secured aside from the time chain ledger? This is general hand waving. How do you secure something other than bitcoin using bitcoin?
Design an API that requires all control actions, or especially sensitive control actions to be stamped with X amount of bitpower, therefore verifying a superfluous physical cost was paid to send the control signal. It's not actually that complicated lmao.
> Design an API This is exactly what I’m asking for. I don’t think you can. I don’t think anyone can. Lots of theories fall flat at practical application and I think softwar is one of them. Cool theory, doesn’t work in practice. > it’s not actually that complicated lmao. So give me the concrete design for the API and stop with the theoretical word salad. I understand the thesis and all it entails. Doesn’t mean shit if you can’t deliver functioning code.
Who says functioning code hasn't already been implemented. Bitcoins network PROVES this concept is totally valid.
You have circular logic. Good luck. Let me know when you have bitcoin protecting some other system than itself in cyberspace.
Military is already doing it.
Do tell. (Former DoD Intel for 11yrs until 2019)
2019 was a long time ago.
Agreed. 👌
Is this implying that some is running something "Turing complete" on btc?
It implies a lot. None of it verifiable.
#Bitcoin is the implementation
🤔 But space bois thesis says it goes beyond bitcoin. That’s what I don’t grok.
Bitcoin is passive power projection from we the people.
Eventually the entirety of the collective human consciousness will use this protocol to establish our intraspecies dominance hierarchy. https://image.nostr.build/9eba50ef500fb32e657a6c40c509a8ff2c7baf8a7414dbae43c2df3378ef92ff.jpg
How does Bitcoins network ensure the people running it don't bypass its requirements or enforce its security?
Economic consistency. Predictability. All valuable to bitcoins layer 0 - the people.
The real answer is physical power.
Right. Meat space. My question is around cyberspace.
The Bitcoin protocol is a brute-force physical power digitization protocol.
The Bitcoin protocol is a brute-force physical power digitization protocol.
