Bitcoin Thesis Becomes Amazon Bestseller
To many readers, a master’s thesis doesn’t sound like a page-turner, but a long academic paper on Bitcoin written by a US space force major has emerged as a popular choice on Amazon.
“Softwar” claims that Bitcoin has the potential to play a major role on the world’s geopolitical stage as a military-grade solution for securing information – far different from the spending Bitcoin’s network has today.
The report was written by Jason Lowery and represents the culmination of academic research he conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during a 6-month grant sponsored by the Department of Defense. The full title of the piece is “Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin.”
Lowrey’s brief biography on Amazon claims that he has advised several senior US officials on Bitcoin-related policy in offices related to the president, the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs of staff.
Although “Software” does not rank among the top 500 books in Amazon’s store, Lowery’s exploration of Bitcoin has hovered around number one in Amazon’s digital currency category and is currently ranked number two in both books on technology and engineering.
The more than 350-page book draws on knowledge from various fields, such as anthropology and computer science, to establish and explore Lowery’s “Power Projection Theory.”
Essentially, Lowery argues that the proof-of-work system underlying Bitcoin transaction verification can be exploited by military powers to impose restrictions on bad actors in a non-lethal way through a steep amount of physical work in the form of number-crunching.
“The conclusion is that Bitcoin may represent a ‘softwar’ or electrocyber defense protocol, not just a peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” the book says. “While most software can only logically limit computers, Bitcoin can physically limit computers.”
The book’s acknowledgments section gives a nod to some of Bitcoin’s most stalwarts, including MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor and Peter McCormack.
In his article, Lowrey also writes that insufficient reserves of Bitcoin held on behalf of the US government could pose a threat to the nation’s national security if the network is used as a cyber security tool.
“If the United States does not consider stockpiling strategic Bitcoin reserves, or at least encouraging Bitcoin adoption,” he said, “the United States could lose a strategically vital power […] and sat back in global power dominance.”
Given that Lowrey’s thesis was published in February and the US announced that it sold $215 million in seized Bitcoin last month, maybe not all Feds are on the same page.
The book also contains a disclosure stating that the paper does not reflect any official position held by the DoD, Air Force or MIT.
Of the more than 200 reviews “Software” has received on Amazon, a majority gave the book five stars.
But a few reviews say Lowrey’s text is lacking due to “too much wishful thinking”, “arguments based on opinion” and quotes from “The Matrix” which “detract from the seriousness of the subject”.
