Oddbean

maybe the incoming administration will be willing to setup and deploy Hash Force? Jason Lowery is back. > My goal is to advise the Department of Defense on the national strategic significance of Proof-of-Work (PoW) technology and provide senior leaders with policy recommendations related to a strategic Bitcoin stockpile and the U.S. Hash Force. https://bitbo.io/news/jason-lowery-bitcoin-defense/

I read a lot of it and the basic premise is that in the natural world “might is right” and you can’t fake it. In cyberspace everything was based on rules enforced by logic until bitcoin came along and imposed a physical cost for interactions. It’s more than just PoW though obviously because with bitcoin you have a whole system engineered around it (difficulty adjustment, finite supply, etc) that imposes further costs. Spend your bitcoin chasing a honeypot? It’s gone. GG. Honestly his talk in the MIT lecture hall and his interview with McCormick covers most of it. He speaks in vague ideas probably because it’s not smart to divulge true military advantages if he has them and/or trying to get them.

Because he failed to substantiate his claim that Bitcoin’s hash rate can be used to defend anything other than Bitcoin’s network. Listen to his episode on TFTC from 2022, Marty presses him on it and he couldn’t give a concrete example. There are other criticisms about his thesis that people like Lopp made that he refused to address. He first said anyone that didn’t buy and read his thesis couldn’t criticize him, so people went and read it and instead of addressing things he just blocked people lol. Idk how anyone can take him seriously. Dude is a spook

As for hash rate, it does make sense to me for governments with a vested interest in Bitcoin to want to mining and defend the network themselves, just like non government users do. Maybe he doesn't have any other arguments beyond that because they don't exist. How is he a spook? You know he works for the US government. So to thousands of other Bitcoiners. They just don't tell you. A spook would be someone that doesn't tell you.

What you said is not a new idea. He was outright saying or implying you can use the hash rate to protect other things other than the network. I mean spook in the sense that he may not be what he presenta himself as being. The way he came into the scene is kinda sus. The general vibe is off, but that’s just my opinion.

Just speculating here, but it might be possible to leverage the hash rate and messages passed via Bitcoin’s blockchain for security. Think something like OpenTimestamps. One idea could be that you set up a firewall that requires an extremely high proof of work before accepting packets. The firewall might be some specialized hardware for this. If your message was passed inside a block you could use the PoW from that? The idea is to set the bar prohibitively high and the bar doesn’t get higher than the PoW applied to bitcoin. Again just speculating. I imagine if the guy had a novel idea he wouldn’t divulge the advantage publicly…

Cryptography doesn’t prove the sender expended energy. You can require the message be encrypted but the sender could’ve sent 100M emails. If your service requires PoW then it prevents a denial of service. You can also require requests to be collateralized with bitcoin so that the attacker needs to think twice. If they send to a honeypot they lost their corn and got nothing in return. Forcing the messages to touch the chain severely restricts the volume of requests and also leaves a public audit trail. Again I’m just speculating here and honestly don’t have a clue what he’s trying to do but there might be something there.

He makes claims he can't back up. He refuses to engage in rational discourse. He employs his own softwar tactics to impose high costs upon those who question him. I'm also 98% convinced that he operates social media Sybil accounts to make it appear that lots of people agree with him. https://blog.lopp.net/softwar-thesis-review/

You’re probably right with your criticisms and I haven’t read your review (yet!) but if the guy has legitimately novel and useful ideas for the military I’m sure he can’t give it all away for adversaries to copy. That could explain some of his behavior, no? Not the Sybil accounts of course.