Space Force major to Pentagon: Mine Bitcoin!

With help from Rebecca Kern and Derek Robertson

Maybe Bitcoin isn’t really internet money. Perhaps it is a weapon to wage a new form of 21st century cyber warfare.

That’s what one of the main characters in the space force argues for in a new MIT master’s thesis that is causing a minor stir online in the wake of its publication last month. The 400-page book took the top spot on Amazon’s list of best-selling technology books earlier this month and is currently at #3.

There’s no sign the Pentagon is following through on the idea, but the brief offers the latest hint that as a new generation enters key American institutions, its members see crypto networks as useful tools rather than gimmicks.

And if Jason Lowery’s “Software” is any indication, their thinking is getting more creative. The last time DFD brought you a Bitcoin proposal from Cambridge, Mass., was in November when a graduate student at Harvard’s economics department published a paper recommending that central banks are stockpiling on the digital resource. While you might call that proposal avant-garde, at least it fits established ways of thinking about Bitcoin.

By comparison, Lowery’s thesis is positively galaxy-brain based.

“Softwar” claims the proof-of-work guessing game underpinning Bitcoin offers a less messy path to future power competition than nuclear war or swarms of killer robots.

The metaphor Lowery uses, and uses for a cover image, is antlers. They may look silly, but they allow two deer to fight each other over territory without inflicting lethal damage.

In the case of proof-of-work cyber antlers, the winner in each round wins some network tokens and the right to publish the next block of transactions. Because proof-of-work depends on the ability to harness energy to generate computer guesses, the power in the network will be widely distributed across the physical space of different energy sources that are difficult to centrally control.

In some ways, the role Lowery envisions for proof-of-work competitions is similar to that played by chess matches and the Olympics during the Cold War: a form of competition that fails a shooting war. Rather than achieving national prestige, the winner of proof-of-work contests gains power within a distributed computer network used to award abstract property rights.

The stakes in this competition would be higher if countries followed a related proposal from the paper: to use Bitcoin as a cybersecurity tool.

That idea dates back to the pre-Bitcoin development of proof-of-work, when computer scientist Adam Back proposed “hashcash” in 1997. The idea was to thwart spammers by requiring email senders to solve a guessing problem that required a moderate amount of computing power—like a simpler form of Bitcoin mining—to make it prohibitively expensive to bombard thousands of people with spam.

Following Back, Lowery suggests that software systems can prevent certain types of attacks, such as denial-of-service attacks – which overwhelm servers by flooding them with incoming requests – with Bitcoin. The idea is to design programs that only respond to external signals that are accompanied by sufficiently large transactions recorded on the Bitcoin network.

If the network doubled as a cyber security system, there would be all the more reason to compete for a portion of control and prevent adversaries from gaining special leverage over it.

Lowery, who is not short of imaginative metaphors, also suggests that the Bitcoin network constitutes the cyber equivalent of maritime trade routes – in other words, as a vector of economic exchange – and that there is a military imperative to protect freedom of navigation. on the network.

The thesis calls for the US to store Bitcoin, cultivate a domestic Bitcoin mining industry and extend Second Amendment protections to the technology on the theory that it is a weapon of self-defense.

The proposal is certainly creative, but is it plausible?

Military thinkers entertain all sorts of ideas out there. Some, like splitting the nucleus of an atom, pan out. Others Do not do it.

An Air Force spokesperson confirmed only Lowery’s rank, that he was a US Air Force fellow at MIT, and that he is stationed at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida. Joan Rubin, executive director of MIT’s systems design and management program, confirmed that the thesis was submitted as part of Lowery’s doctoral studies.

Lowery himself did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Beyond the imaginative and technical obstacles to this vision are political. Although the Pentagon embraces Lowery’s views on the military value of Bitcoin, the United States faces conflicting national imperatives to curb carbon emissions and maintain the ability to impose sanctions through the dollar banking systems.

On Twitter, Lowery has been outspoken, but vague, about impending government threats to Bitcoin.

“Soon, powerful people in the US government will try to claim this support #Bitcoin is a threat to US national security,” he said in a recent tweet, which appears to have been deleted.

“I don’t know how else I can be more explicitly clear to the public without getting in trouble,” he began a tweet Tuesday that issued a similar warning.

So it seems that anyone who wants the US government to grow a pair of cyber antlers must first master other forms of non-lethal resource competition: argument and bureaucratic jockeying.

Don’t throw a “law book” at the metaverse, says Clegg: Metas no. 2 Nick Clegg asked European regulators to tread lightly when setting driving rules for the metaverse. During an interview with Rebecca Kern and other journalists on metaverse on Wednesday via Meta’s Horizon Workroom, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister discussed his views on The European Commission’s “virtual worlds” initiative that sets guidelines for the new technology.

“As a former regulator legislator myself, I would caution against regulators trying to regulate something that has not yet taken shape because you end up regulating the wrong thing,” said Clegg’s avatar – which bore a striking resemblance, down to his thick- glasses and a navy suit jacket with pockets.

“You have to go through a pretty deep phase of understanding first, rather than immediately throwing a heavy kind of law book at something that’s not yet fully invented,” added Clegg, who as Meta’s president of global affairs oversees the company’s policy and regulatory decisions.

He said some of the biggest players building the hardware and operating systems for the metaverse are from the US and China – and especially not from Europe. “So it would be a shame if Europe were to rush to legislate something that is actually being invented elsewhere and is nowhere near fully formed yet.” — Rebecca Kern

The seemingly world-shattering potential of generative AI have some loud voices asking for a break.

Following the high profile open letter published this week which featured more than 1,000 signatories calling for a six-month pause on AI development, the research nonprofit Center for AI and Digital Policy has submitted a consumer complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate OpenAI, as POLITICO’s Mohar Chatterjee reported in today’s Morning Tech newsletter for Pro subscribers.

Calls for more caution, and even explicit regulatory guardrails, around AI are growing rapidly. As Mohar also points out, CAIDP leader Merve Hickok appeared before a House committee this month and called for more regulatory measures.

And Dario Gil, senior VP and director of IBM Research, told Morning Tech that “Uncontrolled, broad experiments, especially on the public, are the wrong way to advance any category of innovation and especially one as powerful as artificial intelligence … For AI, that means careful implementations focused on specific use cases with the right controls and governance in place, and ethical considerations addressed from the start. We will all benefit more from AI done responsibly than from reckless experimentation.” — Derek Robertson