The second amendment of the US constitution, the right to bear arms, should apply to bitcoin according to Jason Lowery, a Space Force Major with the US army.

In a speech at the MIT Bitcoin Expo earlier this week (Track A starts at 1:50), Lowery argued that bitcoin presents the application of physical costs or benefits to attack and defense, in addition to logical costs and benefits, in cyber-space.

Until now and for the past 80 years he says, only logic has been used in cyber defense, that being the ifs and thens to protect information.

But bitcoin’s translation of physical energy into bits, secured by this physical energy or potentially attacked by it too, gives rise to soft-warfare in cyber he says, and that’s good because unlike actual warfare, there’s no playgrounds that get bombed but bits of data.

Bit Power, he calls what he suggests might be the wider application in military theory of the bitcoin invention.

Nature imposes a benefit of attack and a cost of attack, he says. Bees have honey, but bees sting too.

At the national level we have the army to impose the costs, and nowadays America has a space army as the space age begins.

In cyber however there is no mass so you can’t use force to move the mass away. Instead, to impose a cost of attack you can protect the state machine by imposing an energy expense.

In many ways this is basically using military terminology to describe how bitcoin’s hash function works. Not that bitcoin is a stranger to it. The Byzantine Army Generals problem is of course what it solves.

Yet rewording it and putting it in that context demystifies bitcoin, and generalizes it beyond finance to explain how we can potentially secure data in other areas too.

The blockchain, though not as much in fashion nowadays is, we think, finding some application in the military.

Estonia used some sort of a blockchain, before the term was coined, to secure their state level digital systems.

Bitcoin goes further to require physical input from asics, and though no one has tried to attack it, Lowery argues every American has the right to bear asics to defend bitcoin if it ever was attacked.

So we’ve gone from bitcoin is patriotic to bitcoin is protected by the second amendment in about two or three years, when some might remember the curious incident abut a decade ago of an FBI agent getting arrested for stealing bitcoin from Silk Road while he was investigating it.

That’s when the boys met the coin, at a time when some cryptonians not only thought, but expected the US government to ban it.

Instead that incident was the first sign they might like the shiny thing. And since then there have been plenty of other signs that they like crypto, basically.

This addressing of a bitcoin audience in uniform therefore, for the first time and anywhere in the world as far as we are aware, is a clear message as far as we are concerned and we think we can read it clearly.

Lowery previously said he had been asked to appear in uniform as “it was part of my official duties as a US National Defense Fellow researching Bitcoin.”

In the speech he said he was speaking on behalf of himself, not representing the US National Defense, but in the national security circles a thinking is clearly developing that bitcoin is advantageous to US interests.

China has done them a great favor in that regard by banning bitcoin. Putin has been smarter. “Blockchain is Ours Says Russian Delegate,” was our 2018 headline.

Europe is competing with soft power, passing friendly legislation that may attract the talent. While the boys are clearly starting to think about the bigger picture.

About tomorrow. And their point, beyond the theory, or rewording or the terminology they understand, is don’t touch this.

At one point Lowery seemingly lets loose or goes off script, while making the point that politicians should not blame bitcoin for potential problems in the system that have nothing to do with bitcoin.

Bitcoin didn’t make the banks collapse in 2008, he said, it didn’t make banks leverage, it didn’t make anyone bailout the banks, and if it is scapegoated, then it is denying us access to the new bit power which would be a strategic nightmare. Worse he says even than China burning down the navy fleet.

In a war, a full blown one, where banks might collapse, or if they collapse in peace too as sometime they do, one can see how he can potentially be right as in that situation, there would be at least for some another form of bank money, crypto.

In the United States, it is thought about 20% of the population cryptos. Their level of awareness is sufficient enough that in a real emergency, god forbid, at least 70% of them can probably use crypto.

It might be slightly less in Europe, but around the same. In Russia they’re not as technical, while in China they halted the skill base considerably so we’d say maybe 30% can do the same.

There is no military without civil society. While the boys advance in eastern Ukraine, the rest of the country has to keep working, and even better than before, to support them.

As a lubricant of all commerce, money can’t be put in one Fed basket, especially as banks are prone to crisis and the more so if the crisis is kinetic.

That’s what we take Lowery to be saying, though symbolically as he was a lot more focused. But basically we see this as one power block telling another, the SEC or whoever, that they need to think more because there are different angles and the simplistic ree bitcoin can be a strategic nightmare.

So far this block has only shown up to say this far and no more, or maybe that’s when we paid attention, but they appear to be forming theories that see bitcoin as a force or technology and as a subject of observation rather than policy, not least because it is a tool that doesn’t necessarily care about your opinion.

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• Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2023/04/26/bitcoin-is-protected-by-the-second-amendment-says-space-force-major