Space Force major to Pentagon: Mine Bitcoin!
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Space Force major to Pentagon: Mine Bitcoin!
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With help from Rebecca Kern and Derek Robertson
Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman (R), Space Force and Command Senior Enlisted Leader and CMSgt Roger Towberman (L), with Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett in the Oval Office in 2020. | Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images
Maybe Bitcoin isn’t really internet money. Maybe it’s a weapon for waging a new form of 21st-century cyber warfare.
That’s what one major in the Space Force is arguing in a new MIT masters degree thesis that is causing a minor stir online in the wake of its publication last month. The 400-page tome snagged the top spot on Amazon’s list of best-selling technology books earlier this month and currently sits at #3.
There’s no sign the Pentagon is acting on the idea, but the thesis offers the latest hint that as a new generation enters important American institutions, its members see crypto networks as useful tools instead of gimmicks.
And if Jason Lowery’s “Softwar” 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 PhD student in Harvard’s economics department published a paper recommending that central banks stock up on the digital asset. While you might call that proposal avant-garde, it at least fits established ways of thinking about Bitcoin.
By comparison, Lowery’s thesis is positively galaxy-brained.
“Softwar” argues that the proof-of-work guessing game that underpins Bitcoin offers a less messy avenue for future power competition than nuclear war or swarms of killer robots.
The metaphor Lowery employs, and uses for a cover image, is that of antlers. They may look silly, but they allow two stags to fight each other over territory without inflicting fatal damage.
In the case of proof-of-work cyber-antlers, the victor 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, power in the network would be widely distributed throughout physical space to disparate energy sources that are difficult to centrally control.
In some ways, the role Lowery envisions for proof-of-work contests is similar to the one played by chess matches and the Olympics during the Cold War: a form of competition that falls short of a shooting war. Instead of gaining national prestige, the winner of proof-of-work competitions gains power within a distributed computer network that is being used to assign abstract property rights.
The stakes of this contest would be higher if countries followed a related proposal from the thesis: to use Bitcoin as a cyber-security tool.
That idea hearkens back to the pre-Bitcoin development of proof-of-work, when, in 1997, computer scientist Adam Back proposed “hashcash.” The idea was to thwart spammers by requiring email senders to solve a guessing problem that required a moderate amount of computer power — like an easier form of Bitcoin mining — to make it prohibitively costly to blast thousands of people with junk mail.
Following Back, Lowery suggests that software systems can thwart certain kinds of attacks, like 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, that would be all the more reason to compete for a share of control and to prevent adversaries from gaining special influence over it.
Lowery, who does not lack for imaginative metaphors, also suggests that the Bitcoin network amounts to a cyber-equivalent to maritime trade routes — in other words, as a vector for economic exchange — and that there is a military imperative to protect freedom of navigation on the network.
The thesis calls for the U.S. to stockpile Bitcoin, cultivate a domestic Bitcoin mining industry, and extend 2nd Amendment protections to the technology on the theory that it’s a weapon of self-defense.
The proposal is certainly creative, but is it plausible?
Military thinkers entertain all sorts of out-there ideas. Some, like splitting the nucleus of an atom, pan out. Others don’t.
An Air Force spokesperson confirmed only Lowery’s rank, that he was a U.S. Air Force fellow at MIT, and that he is stationed at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida. Joan Rubin, executive director of MIT’s System Design and Management program, confirmed the thesis was submitted as part of Lowery’s graduate studies.
Lowery himself did not respond to several interview requests.
Beyond the imaginative and technical hurdles to this vision, there are political ones. Even if the Pentagon embraces Lowery’s view of the military value of Bitcoin, the U.S. faces countervailing 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 within the US government will try to assert that supporting #Bitcoin is a threat to US National Security,” he said in one recent tweet, that appears to have been deleted.
“I don’t know how else I can be more explicitly clear with the public without getting in trouble,” he began a tweet on Tuesday that offered a similar warning.
So, it seems that anyone who wants the U.S. government to grow a pair of cyber-antlers will first need to master other forms of non-lethal resource competition: argumentation and bureaucratic jockeying.
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TikTok is building systems tailor-made to address concerns around data security. What’s more, these systems will be managed by a U.S.-based team specifically tasked with managing all access to U.S. user data and securing the TikTok platform. It’s part of TikTok’s commitment to securing personal data while still giving the global TikTok experience people know and love. Learn more at http://usds.TikTok.com.
clegg lays down the law
Nick Clegg in 2017. | Getty Images
Don’t throw a ‘law book’ at the metaverse, Clegg says: Meta’s no. 2 Nick Clegg called for European regulators to tread lightly when setting rules of the road for the metaverse. During an interview with Rebecca Kern and other journalists on the metaverse Wednesday via Meta’s Horizon Workroom, the former U.K. deputy prime minister discussed his views on the European Commission’s “virtual worlds” initiative that’s setting guidelines for the new technology.
“As an ex-regulator legislator myself, I would caution against regulators seeking to regulate something which hasn’t yet taken shape because you end up regulating the wrong thing,” said Clegg’s avatar — which bore a striking resemblance, down to his thick-rimmed glasses and navy blue suit jacket with pocket square.
“You do need to go through quite a profound phase of understanding first, rather than immediately throwing a heavy kind of law book at something which hasn’t yet been fully invented,” Clegg added, 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 U.S. and China — and notably not from Europe. “So it’d be a shame if Europe were to rush to legislate something which is actually being invented elsewhere, and it hasn’t remotely yet taken full form.” — Rebecca Kern
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putting the brakes on ai?
The seemingly world-breaking potential of generative AI has some major voices calling for a pause.
Following the high-profile open letter published this week that featured more than 1,000 signatories asking for a six-month pause on AI development, the research nonprofit Center for AI and Digital Policy has filed 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.
The calls for more caution, and even explicit regulatory guardrails, around AI are growing fast. As Mohar also points out, CAIDP’s chair Merve Hickok appeared before a House committee this month and pleaded for more regulatory action.
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 particularly one as powerful as artificial intelligence… For AI, that means careful implementations focused on specific use cases with proper controls and governance in place, and ethical considerations addressed from the outset. All of us stand to benefit more from AI done responsibly than from reckless experimentation.” — Derek Robertson
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the future in 5 links
- A New York Times writer rated chatbots’ performance as executive assistants.
- Sony’s new VR headset is off to a slow sales start.
- Lose it all with FTX? Try the vibrant ecosystem of crypto bankruptcy markets.
- The Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight has been pushed back until July (at least).
- Newly sophisticated sensors are forcing militaries to reinvent camouflage.
Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([email protected]); Steve Heuser ([email protected]); and Benton Ives ([email protected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.
Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency.
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