Proof-of-Power is Proof-of-Ownership
Imagine you're at a playground with a really cool toy. Who gets to play with it? The kid who can hold onto it! Not because of rules, not because a teacher said so, but because they're strong enough to keep it. That's how ALL of nature works.
A wolf doesn't need a "deed" to own its territory. It just proves it can defend it. That's proof-of-power proof-of-power Using physical force to protect resources and establish ownership. It's not about violence, but about the credible ability to impose physical costs. Chapter 1 = proof-of-ownership.
In the natural world, there are no courts, no titles, no property deeds. Ownership is established through a single mechanism: the ability to physically defend a resource. A wolf's territory belongs to the wolf that can project enough physical power to maintain it.
This isn't about violence. It's about credible deterrence. Most territorial displays never result in actual combat. The display itself communicates power, and the weaker party retreats. Resources are allocated through physical reality, not abstract agreement.
Lowery establishes the foundational principle of the thesis in Chapter 3: physical power projection is the primary mechanism through which biological organisms establish and maintain resource control. He argues this principle operates as a thermodynamic necessity. Living systems that cannot project sufficient physical power to secure energy sources are inevitably displaced by those that can.
"In the state of nature, there are no abstract property rights. There is only physical power and the credible ability to project it."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 62
Life vs. Entropy
Everything in the universe is falling apart. That's entropy. Your sandcastle crumbles, ice cream melts, stars burn out. Life is the one thing that fights back. But fighting entropy costs energy. Lots of it.
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, always increases. Life is the universe's anomaly: an organized system that temporarily resists dissolution by consuming energy. Every living organism is essentially a machine that converts energy into local order, pushing back against the cosmic tendency toward chaos.
This means every organism is in constant competition for energy. Not out of greed, but out of thermodynamic necessity. If you can't secure enough energy to maintain your structure, entropy wins and you die. This is the fundamental driver behind all resource competition.
Lowery frames biological resource competition through the lens of thermodynamics (pp. 59-68), arguing that the struggle for survival is fundamentally a struggle against entropy. Living systems are dissipative structures that maintain far-from-equilibrium states by continuously processing energy flows. The implication is that resource competition is not a behavioral choice but a physical necessity dictated by the laws of thermodynamics.
The BCRA Equation
Before a bully steals your lunch, they think: "Is this lunch worth the trouble?" If you look tough, they'll leave you alone. If you look small and carry a big lunch, watch out!
That's the BCR_A BCR_A The ratio of how much an attacker gains versus how much it costs them to attack. When BCR_A < 1, attacking is irrational. Chapter 1 : Benefit of taking something divided by the Cost of trying. When the cost is higher than the benefit, nobody attacks.
The Benefit-to-Cost Ratio of Attack (BCRA) is the thesis's core analytical framework. Every potential attacker subconsciously calculates: how much do I gain (BA) versus how much does it cost me (CA)?
When BCRA > 1, attacking is rational. When BCRA < 1, it's not worth it. Security, at every scale from elk to nations, is fundamentally about ensuring the cost of attack exceeds the benefit.
The BCRA framework (pp. 75-82) formalizes a cost-benefit model for predatory behavior. Lowery argues this ratio is computed at all biological scales, from the molecular (immune system responses) to the geopolitical (deterrence theory). The critical insight is that security is not about preventing attacks per se, but about manipulating the attacker's cost-benefit calculation so that rational actors choose not to attack.
The Survivor's Dilemma
Here's the tricky part: the better you do, the more people want to take your stuff! If you find a huge pile of candy, everyone notices. Now you need an even BIGGER fence. That's the Survivor's Dilemma: getting rich makes you a target.
Success creates vulnerability. As an organism or nation accumulates resources, its BA grows, and it becomes a more attractive target. Unless it simultaneously increases CA (its defensive capability), it enters a danger zone where the benefit of attacking it exceeds the cost.
This is the Survivor's Dilemma: you must grow your defenses faster than your wealth, or your wealth will attract predators you can't repel. Every wealthy entity that failed to maintain this balance has been destroyed.
The Survivor's Dilemma (pp. 83-90) represents a dynamic equilibrium problem. Resource accumulation increases BA monotonically, requiring proportional or greater increases in CA to maintain BCRA < 1. Lowery identifies this as the root cause of the "all honey, no sting" vulnerability pattern observed in domesticated populations, entities that accumulated value without maintaining physical power projection capability.
The Survivor's Dilemma
Imagine you found a giant pile of candy in the jungle. Awesome! But every animal can smell it on you. The more candy you grab, the bigger target you become. Do you keep grabbing more... or spend time building a fort?
Every organism faces a core dilemma: growing your resource abundance (BA) makes you more attractive to predators, raising your BCRA. But the environment's hazardous BCRA threshold is invisible and always dropping. You have three options, but only one works long-term. Choose a strategy and see what happens.
Lowery describes the Survivor's Dilemma (pp. 75-78): organisms cannot know what BCRA level qualifies as hazardous, nor the rate at which it falls in an increasingly CCCH environment. Like the proverb "I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you" (p. 77), the optimal strategy is to lower BCRA as fast as possible, treating CA as the throttle and BA as the brake in what Lowery calls "two-pedal driving" (p. 78). This simulation models the three strategic options from Figure 16.
You're an animal in a dangerous jungle. Every season you get a little bigger, but so do the hungry predators watching you. The more candy you collect, the yummier you look. Pick how you want to grow and see if you survive!
Pick a strategy:
You lead a population in a hostile environment. Each generation, your resources (BA) and defenses (CA) grow, but how you grow determines whether you survive. An invisible predator threshold drops every generation. If your BCRA exceeds it, you're devoured.
Choose one of three strategies from the thesis (Figure 16, p. 76):
This simulation models Figure 16 (p. 76). An organism starts with equal BA and CA (BCRA = 1.0). The hazardous BCRA threshold is invisible, monotonically decreasing, and represents the CCCH environment's rising competitive pressure. Select one of Lowery's three strategic options to observe BCRA trajectory over 12 generations.
Select a power projection strategy (pp. 75-82):
Bowtie Notation
Let's draw a picture to make this easier! Imagine every creature as a little bowtie shape. The left circle (green) shows how yummy your stuff looks to bullies, which is BA. The right circle (red) shows how tough you are, which is CA.
If your green circle is huge and your red circle is tiny, you look like a floating gift basket, easy pickings! But if your red circle is big and your green circle is small, attackers think "not worth it" and leave you alone.
Bowtie notation is the visual language used throughout the entire thesis to represent an organism's BCRA. Picture a bowtie shape: the left lobe (green) represents BA, the resource attractiveness, or how much an attacker stands to gain. The right lobe (red) represents CA, the defensive power, or the cost an attacker would pay.
A lopsided bowtie with a big green lobe and a tiny red lobe is what Lowery calls a "floating gift basket," an organism that has accumulated valuable resources but cannot defend them. Predators see an irresistible target. Conversely, a bowtie with a dominant red lobe signals "don't even think about it." This visual vocabulary makes it easy to think like a predator, a form of adversarial thinking that helps identify vulnerabilities.
Lowery introduces bowtie notation (pp. 79-80) as a formalized visual representation of the BCRA framework. The organism's BCRA is depicted as a bowtie where the knot represents the ratio point, the left lobe scales with BA (resource abundance/attractiveness), and the right lobe scales with CA (capacity to impose physical costs). This notation is explicitly designed to facilitate adversarial thinking, learning to evaluate targets the way a predator would.
"An organism's BCRA can be represented by the knot in the center of a bowtie, where each side of the tie represents BA and CA... This notation is useful for learning how to think like a predator by visualizing how 'appetizing' organisms are for neighboring life to devour, a practice known as adversarial thinking."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 79
The Bowtie: Security in One Shape
Imagine you see a toy on the ground. The green circle is how much you want it. The amber circle is how hard it would be to take. If it's easy to take and very tempting, someone will grab it!
The bowtie is the thesis's core visual model. The green lobe represents BA, how attractive a resource is to an attacker. The amber lobe represents CA, how much physical power it would cost to take it. The ratio between them determines whether attack is rational.
Lowery's Bowtie Notation (pp. 75-82) formalizes the Benefit-to-Cost Ratio of Attack (BCRA). When BA/CA > 1, attacking is thermodynamically rational. Security means ensuring CA always exceeds BA, a principle that applies from elk territories to Bitcoin mining.
Three Strategies for Infinite Prosperity
So you want to keep getting richer without getting eaten? You have three choices:
Choice 1: Get rich fast, don't build defenses. Your BCRA goes UP. Result? You get devoured. Choice 2: Get rich AND build defenses at the same speed. Your BCRA stays the same. Sounds okay, but the world keeps getting more dangerous, so "staying the same" actually means falling behind. Choice 3: Build defenses FASTER than you get rich. Your BCRA goes DOWN. This is the only path that works long-term!
Every organism pursuing prosperity faces three strategic options, each illustrated by bowtie notation:
Option 1, Increasing BCRA: Grow BA faster than CA. This is the most energy-efficient path to resource abundance, but from a predator's perspective, you become an increasingly attractive target. Eventually, you get devoured.
Option 2, Fixed BCRA: Grow BA and CA at equal rates. Your ratio stays constant, but the environment keeps getting more competitive. The hazardous BCRA threshold drops over time as neighbors cooperate and innovate. Standing still means falling behind.
Option 3, Decreasing BCRA: Grow CA faster than BA. This looks "energy-inefficient" because you're spending watts on defense instead of growth. But it's the only strategy with the highest probability of long-term survival. All three paths converge on the same insight: the infinitely prosperous organism is one that can increase CA ad infinitum.
Lowery formalizes three power projection strategies for pursuing infinite prosperity (pp. 81-82). Option 1 (increasing BCRA) maximizes resource accumulation at the expense of security, and the organism becomes a target of opportunity. Option 2 (fixed BCRA) maintains a constant ratio, but fails to account for the dynamic CCCH environment where the hazardous threshold drops as neighbors adopt more effective cooperation tactics. Option 3 (decreasing BCRA) prioritizes CA growth, appearing energy-inefficient but yielding the largest prosperity margin over time.
"Of these three options, option #3 has the highest probability of long-term survival because it minimizes the organism's BCRA and results in the largest prosperity margin. Option #3 accounts for the unescapable reality that Earth is a dynamic CCCH environment filled with murderous, fratricidal, and cannibalistic predators determined to devour high BCRA organisms."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 82
Cooperation: Sticking Together
For almost two billion years, life was just tiny single cells floating around, eating each other. They hit a ceiling because one cell alone can only get so tough. So how did life level up?
Some cells called archaeon grew sticky tentacles and literally grabbed their neighbors, trapping them under one shared wall. It wasn't a friendship. It was a forced merger! But the result was amazing: suddenly the group was WAY tougher than any single cell. Like how one kid can't move a heavy rock, but five kids together can.
And here's the scary part: once some cells teamed up, the loners became the easiest targets. If your neighbors form a team and you don't? You're the weakest one on the playground. Cooperate or get eaten. That's the rule.
For nearly two billion years, life existed as a murderous soup of single-celled organisms, each trapped in a bounded prosperity ceiling. Individual cells could only grow their CA so much on their own. Then something remarkable happened: small bacterial cells called archaeon, likely spurred by the oxygen catastrophe caused by photosynthesis, mutated to form Velcro-like tendrils that could physically capture neighboring cells and entrap them under a common membrane.
This was not diplomacy. Archaeon did not negotiate treaties with their neighbors. They captured them by force, the same way all living creatures capture resources. But the result was a step-function increase in CA at virtually no individual cost. Clustered cells pooled their physical power projection capacity, becoming far more formidable than any single-celled organism.
The "Bigger Fish" scenario illustrates what happens next: imagine 12 organisms with different BCRA levels sharing a hostile environment. The high BCRA organisms get devoured first. Survivors begin cooperating into groups (Alpha and Bravo), forming multicellular organisms. Now the remaining loners face a dramatically more hostile environment. Their BCRA didn't change, but the threshold dropped because their neighbors got bigger. Cooperation creates a Schelling point: once your neighbors cooperate, you must too, or you become the easiest target.
The emergence of cooperation (pp. 83-89) represents a pivotal phase transition in primordial economics. Lowery describes how single-celled life hit a bounded prosperity trap, an inability to sufficiently grow CA at the individual level. Archaeon cells overcame this by evolving physical capture mechanisms (tendrils) that entrapped neighboring cells under common pressurized membranes, producing a step-function CA increase. Critically, this was not a conscious act of cooperation but a physical power projection tactic: one organism physically overpowering and entrapping another.
The "Bigger Fish" scenario (p. 87) formalizes the cooperate-or-die dynamic. In a population of 12 organisms with varying BCRA levels, high BCRA organisms are devoured first, survivors cooperate into multicellular groups, and the hazardous BCRA threshold drops as a result. Non- cooperating organisms face existential risk even if their individual BCRA didn't change. This produces a Schelling point where cooperation begets the need for more cooperation.
"Sticking together is a dual-use power projection tactic which influences both sides of the BCRA equation. Cooperation can be used to grow resource abundance, or it can be used to increase capacity to impose physically prohibitive costs on neighbors. Cooperation therefore introduces its own cooperate-or-die Schelling point."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 86
'There's always a bigger fish,' Qui-Gon Jinn
In Star Wars, Qui-Gon Jinn says 'there's always a bigger fish' after being saved from one sea monster by an even larger one. This throwaway movie line captures a deep biological truth: no matter how large or powerful you become, the environment keeps producing bigger threats. In the 'Bigger Fish' scenario, 12 organisms share a hostile world. The easy targets get devoured first. Survivors stick together, forming two super-organisms, Alpha and Bravo. Now the remaining loners face an environment that just got far more dangerous, even though nothing about them changed. The threshold dropped beneath their feet.
Pack Animals and Fractal Organization
Here's something wild: the same teamwork pattern shows up at EVERY size. Tiny parts inside a cell work together. Cells work together to make a body. Animals work together to make a pack. Packs grow into tribes. Tribes grow into nations. It's the same pattern zoomed in or zoomed out, like a fractal!
One wildebeest can't stop a lion. But a hundred wildebeest backed by the whole herd? Totally different story. And notice: every pack has its fighters, the big, strong members whose job is to protect everyone else. That's true whether you're talking about wolf packs, lion prides, or human armies.
The pattern of cooperation that emerged at the cellular level repeats at every biological scale, from subcellular to cellular to organism to pack to tribe to nation state. This is a fractal structure: the same functional design operating at increasing orders of magnitude. At each scale, individual units pool their CA to form a larger, more capable whole.
Pack animals demonstrate this principle vividly. One wildebeest cannot project enough power to deter a lion, but one wildebeest backed by the exogenous power supply of 99 others certainly can. By working together, each animal gains access to significantly more power projection capacity, enjoys a step-function reduction in individual BCRA, and increases its prosperity margin, all at virtually no individual cost.
A universal feature of pack organization is specialization. Nearly all animal packs dedicate some portion of their workforce to physical power projection, usually via sexual dimorphism, where one gender evolves to be larger, stronger, and more aggressive. These specialized power projectors keep the pack's BCRA low and its prosperity margin wide.
Lowery identifies a fractal organizational structure in biological power projection (pp. 90-93). The same cooperative dynamics that produced multicellular life from single cells recur at every scale: organisms form packs, packs form tribes, tribes form nations. At each level, the functional imperative is identical: pool CA to lower individual BCRA and expand prosperity margin. The form changes, but the function of the system remains constant.
Packs universally develop specialized power-projecting members, typically through sexual dimorphism. This is not coincidental but strategically necessary: the existential importance of maintaining low BCRA compels packs to dedicate resources to a specialized workforce capable of imposing severe physical costs on attackers. Organizations which employ "feed and breed the powerful first" pecking orders are more likely to maintain the CA necessary for long-term survival.
"Pack animals clearly understand that an effective way to impose severe physical costs on attackers is to leverage the power of their pack. One wildebeest may not be able to project enough power to prevent a menacing predator like a lion from attacking it, but one wildebeest backed by the exogenous power supply of 99 other wildebeests certainly can."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 93
Domestication is Dangerous
Here's a scary thought experiment: What if someone figured out how to make a tough animal... not tough anymore? That's exactly what humans did. It's called domestication, and it works like this:
Step 1: Trap the animal. Step 2: Only let the gentle, obedient ones have babies. Step 3: Remove the strong, aggressive ones. Step 4: Repeat for thousands of years. Result? The fierce wolf becomes the friendly dog. The mighty aurochs becomes the docile cow. You shrank their CA to almost nothing and now you control them completely.
"The dominant species on any planet is the one with pets." And here's the really uncomfortable part: if removing an animal's toughness makes it a slave... what happens when humans do that to themselves?
Domestication is one of the most effective power projection tactics ever discovered. It works by exploiting another species' pecking order. The process is straightforward: entrap a wild animal population, selectively feed and breed the most docile and obedient members, remove the strongest and most aggressive from the gene pool, and repeat for generations. Over time, this systematically shrinks the species' CA, their capacity to impose physical costs on their captors.
The wolf-to-dog transformation is the most striking example: 40,000 years of selectively breeding out physical power and aggression turned an apex predator into a dependent creature that worships its master. The same process turned aurochs into cattle, boar into pigs, and junglefowl into chickens. In bowtie terms, domestication takes a low BCRA wild animal and artificially inflates its BCRA by shrinking CA while keeping BA intact.
Lowery draws a provocative conclusion: the dominant species on any planet is the one with pets. If you want to identify the apex predator on an alien world, look for the species that has systematically removed the physical power of dozens of others. And the danger extends inward: self-domestication, where a society voluntarily reduces its own capacity to impose physical costs, is a systemic security hazard. Nature is not cute. Mufasa kills cubs, mother squirrels eat their own babies, and aging is evolved cellular suicide. The comfortable narratives we tell about nature hide its brutal, predatory reality.
Lowery's analysis of domestication (pp. 94-105) reframes it as a power projection tactic operating through pecking order manipulation. The domestication algorithm is formalized as: entrap a wild population, alter their pecking order heuristics by selectively breeding docile members and removing aggressive ones, thereby systematically reducing CA over generations. The result is an artificially inflated BCRA that renders the domesticated species exploitable.
The wolf-to-dog case study (p. 101) demonstrates 40,000 years of pecking order exploitation. Lowery argues that dogs are "man's best friend" precisely because they were genetically modified to worship humans through their pecking order. The broader dataset, spanning at least forty species across mammals, birds, and fishes, creates sufficient evidence for causal inference: altering a species' pecking order to de-prioritize physical power and aggression directly degrades safety, security, and survival capacity.
The self-domestication warning is the section's critical strategic insight. Domestication of other species proves that removing physical power projection capacity is systemically hazardous. If this principle applies across forty animal species, it applies to sapiens as well. Societies that voluntarily reduce their capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on attackers expose themselves to the same vulnerability pattern observed in every domesticated species.
"A dog is a wolf which has had its pecking order exploited over the course of 40,000 years to remove its capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on humans. Take a pack of wolves, neuter the mean and aggressive ones, breed the docile, subservient, and physically deformed ones, and the end state of that process is a short, stubby, dependent creature which worships its master."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 101
Wolf to dog: 40,000 years of shrinking C_A
Compare a Siberian wolf to a dachshund. Same species, separated by 40,000 years of selective breeding. The wolf: lean, powerful, independent, capable of surviving alone in the harshest environments on Earth. The dachshund: short, stubby, dependent, physically incapable of defending itself against almost anything. The difference? Pecking order manipulation. Humans systematically removed the strongest, most aggressive wolves from the breeding pool and rewarded the docile, obedient ones with food and shelter. Generation after generation, the C_A was bred out. The result is a creature genetically optimized to serve its master. It became 'man's best friend' because it was engineered to be.
Physical Power-Based Resource Control
So how does a pack actually decide who gets what? Here's the system:
At the top, there's Physical Power (measured in watts, real energy). Physical power creates Power Projectors, the fighters, the strong members of the pack who protect everyone. Below them are the regular Members who want access to the pack's resources. Members have to ask the Power Projectors for permission to eat.
But here's the sneaky part: the Members decide what's valuable. If everybody decides the lake isn't worth anything anymore, the Power Projectors guarding it suddenly have no power. Value comes from the people, not the fighters.
Lowery models the physical power-based resource control system that emerges in pack animals using three controllers and one controlled process. At the top sits Physical Power (measured in watts), a naturally occurring control authority to which all other controllers are subordinate. No organism can unsubscribe from physics.
Physical power empowers Power Projectors, the specialized, physically powerful members of the pack. Power Projectors exercise control by gaining and defending access to resources. Members are the remaining pack participants who request access to resources, with Power Projectors approving those requests. The controlled process is the state of ownership and chain of custody of the pack's resources.
A critical and often overlooked element of this model: Members exercise their own form of control authority by assigning value to resources. If Members stop valuing a resource, the Power Projectors' control authority over that resource becomes meaningless. Different pecking order heuristics, such as "feed the powerful first" vs. "first come, first served" vs. "feed the eldest first," produce dramatically different BCRA outcomes. Nature's top survivors overwhelmingly converge on physical power-based hierarchies because they minimize BCRA most effectively.
The physical power-based resource control model (pp. 106-110) is formalized using systems-theoretic process analysis. The system consists of three controllers: Physical Power (watts), which acts as an involuntary, naturally-occurring control authority; Power Projectors, which are specialized pack members empowered by physical power to gain and defend access to resources; and Members, who request access to resources and must have those requests approved by Power Projectors.
The controlled process is the state of ownership and chain of custody of the pack's internal resources. Lowery emphasizes a subtle but strategically critical control action: Members assign value to resources. This means Members can render Power Projectors' control authority practically useless by revoking the value they assign to controlled resources. This dynamic becomes especially important when applied to abstract resources like money in human packs. Different pecking order heuristics (power-based vs. seniority-based vs. egalitarian) produce different emergent effects on the organization's BCRA, with power-based hierarchies demonstrably yielding the lowest BCRA in natural selection.
"Members exercise substantial control over the controlled process by assigning value to the resources. This is a subtle but very important control action which often gets overlooked, that will become important to point out later in a discussion about Bitcoin."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 110
The Beauty of Antlers
And here's the beautiful part: antlers let deer compete without killing each other. They push, they shove, the weaker one walks away alive. Nature figured out how to have fair competitions using physical power with no referees, no rules, no cheating, and nobody has to die.
What if humans could build digital antlers?
Antlers represent nature's most elegant solution to the Survivor's Dilemma: a power projection technology that enables fair resource competition without lethal harm. They're metabolically expensive (real physical cost), impossible to fake (proof of genuine biological fitness), and specifically designed for intraspecies contest rather than killing.
This is the bridge to the rest of the thesis. If nature solved the problem of non-lethal physical power competition billions of years ago, could humans engineer an equivalent for the digital age?
The antler analogy (pp. 103-116) is the thesis's foundational metaphor. Lowery argues that intraspecies power projection technologies share key properties: they impose real physical costs (metabolic expenditure), they cannot be counterfeited (phenotypic honesty), and they enable resource allocation through physical contest without population-threatening violence.
"The growing of antlers is metabolically expensive... this apparently wasteful expenditure of energy is the mechanism by which physical power is projected without lethal force."
— Lowery, Softwar, p. 108
Gettysburg rifles: 87% fully loaded
After the Battle of Gettysburg, researchers found that 87% of recovered rifles were still fully loaded. Soldiers had been faking shots rather than actually firing at the enemy. Even in the heat of battle, humans resist killing their own species.