Documentary Anthology
Power Projection Stories from the Softwar Thesis
Real events that shaped history and reveal the patterns of physical power projection the thesis is built on.
Constantinople refuses cannons
In 1453, a Hungarian engineer named Orban offered the Byzantine Emperor his new weapon: a massive cannon. Emperor Constantine XI declined. Orban then walked across enemy lines and offered the same weapon to Sultan Mehmed II, who happily accepted. The sultan used Orban's cannons to breach the legendary Theodosian Walls, walls that had held for a thousand years, and the Byzantine Empire fell.
Tesla and Ford predicted this 100 years ago
In 1900, Nikola Tesla wrote that someday "merely machines will meet in a contest without bloodshed... when this happy condition is realized, peace will be assured." In 1921, Henry Ford predicted an "energy currency" that would stop wars by removing the banker's control over money. Both saw the future a century early.
General Billy Mitchell, court-martialed for being right
In the 1920s, U.S. General Billy Mitchell was court-martialed for insubordination after insisting that airplanes would become as vital as battleships. He demonstrated by sinking a captured German battleship with air-dropped bombs. The military establishment dismissed him. He died in 1936. Nine years later, Pearl Harbor proved him catastrophically right. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Chinese alchemists and black powder
Chinese alchemists discovered black powder while searching for an elixir of immortality. For centuries, they thought it was medicine. Nobody seriously investigated military applications. Eventually, that same substance became gunpowder, the most transformative military technology in human history.
The wolf collar and the golden retriever
Lowery argues that expecting a domesticated modern society to recognize Bitcoin as a warfare technology is like expecting a golden retriever to understand a wolf collar. The instincts have been bred out. We've been so thoroughly domesticated by comfort that we can't even recognize power projection technology when we see it.
Admiral Leahy: "The bomb will never go off"
Admiral William Leahy, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S., told President Truman: "[The Manhattan Project] is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." He was the nation's top military advisor. He was wrong about the most important weapon ever built.
Einstein's reversal
Albert Einstein initially said that nuclear energy was impossible, declaring "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Years later, he wrote the most famous letter in history, urging President Roosevelt to develop atomic weapons before Nazi Germany did.
Columbus and the Jamaica eclipse
In 1504, Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica. The indigenous population had stopped providing food. Columbus knew a lunar eclipse was coming, so he told the locals he would "make the moon disappear" as punishment. When the eclipse occurred on schedule, the terrified population immediately resumed providing supplies.
China burns its naval fleet
In the 1520s, China's Ming dynasty deliberately destroyed its massive naval fleet, the most advanced in the world. They burned ships, destroyed dockyards, and made it illegal to build large vessels. This single decision forfeited over six centuries of naval dominance and handed the seas to European powers.
British Royal Navy rejects torpedoes
When self-propelled torpedoes were first demonstrated in the 1860s, the British Royal Navy dismissed them. One engineer, Robert Whitehead, had invented a weapon that would eventually render surface fleets vulnerable. As Lowery notes: "one engineer exerted more influence than all the world's top Admirals put together."
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.
Apollo and Operation Paperclip
The Apollo moon landing, humanity's greatest achievement, was powered by Saturn V rockets designed by Wernher von Braun, a Nazi scientist brought to America through Operation Paperclip. The astronauts themselves were military test pilots. As Lowery writes: "moonwalkers were apex predators."
The wolf's snarl is her certificate of ownership
Lowery asks the reader to imagine taking freshly hunted meat from a wolf. The wolf doesn't file a lawsuit or negotiate. She snarls, displaying her capacity and willingness to impose severe physical costs. That snarl is her proof-of-power, and her proof-of-power is her proof-of-ownership. Without it, neighboring organisms would perceive she is either sharing or doesn't believe the meat is hers.
Life's first power projection: a microscopic bubble
Four billion years ago, near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the first living organisms captured mineral-rich nutrients using nothing more than a pressurized membrane — a thin film bubble that exerted force on its surrounding environment. Despite being microscopic, these membranes were "iron citadels capable of projecting infinitely more power than the lifeless void which existed before them." From bubbles to armor to castle walls to national borders, the function has never changed.
Warm blood looked wasteful — then it won the planet
Around 250 million years ago, shrew-like creatures evolved endothermy: the ability to burn food to produce their own body heat. Cold-blooded organisms got heat for free from the sun. Warm blood seemed absurdly wasteful — "endotherms have to eat much more than cold-blooded animals just to fuel their inner temperature control." But endothermy let these creatures hunt at night, avoid daytime predators, and operate when cold-blooded rivals couldn't.
The asteroid that proved the shrews right
66 million years ago, a 7.5-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth at sixteen times the speed of a bullet, blocking direct sunlight for years. The biggest, strongest, most energy-efficient dinosaurs died en masse in the resulting food chain collapse — roughly 80% of life on Earth was wiped out. But the smaller, "wasteful" warm-blooded mammals survived. Their endothermic adaptations — speed, eyesight, intelligence — proved essential. "The mighty dinosaurs fall, and the shrews inherit the Earth."
Photosynthesis: the innovation that backfired
Around two billion years ago, bacteria evolved pigments to absorb the sun's harmful radiation. They turned this captured energy into sugars and starch through a process called photosynthesis. But the oxygen exhaust was devastating — for bacteria born into a world without oxygen, "getting covered with oxygen was like getting covered with napalm." The discovery of photosynthesis literally backfired, causing "the first of many mass extinctions in Earth's history, as generation upon generation of living things were burned alive."
Ada Lovelace: the first programmer never saw a computer run
In 1843, a mathematician named Ada Lovelace published the design concept of an algorithm for Charles Babbage's analytic engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. By publishing these instructions, Lovelace became the world's first computer programmer. The art of programming was born as an abstract, creative process — "just like playwrights write stories for actors to perform, computer programmers write stories for general-purpose state machines to perform." Lovelace never lived to see a general-purpose machine execute her work.
ENIAC: the computer built for war, hijacked for the bomb
The first fully-electric general-purpose computer, ENIAC, was commissioned by the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory to calculate firing tables. It reduced artillery trajectory calculations from 20 hours to 30 seconds and replaced 2,400 human calculators. But immediately after it was built, John von Neumann appeared on campus, commandeered the machine, and put it to work on calculations for the Manhattan Project — designing the next version of a nuclear bomb.
Cybercrime: the world's third-largest economy
If the total amount of money stolen from cybercrime were treated as its own country, it would represent the third-largest economy on Earth after the US and China. According to Cybercrime magazine, global cybercrime was projected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, growing at 15% per year. This "represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined."
Would you fly on software that works 90% of the time?
Nancy Leveson, a pioneer in systems safety engineering, highlights software's "curse of flexibility" — it's so easy to make changes that engineers build unmanageable complexity. Shore drove the point home by comparing software to aircraft engineering: "although it is extremely difficult to build a large computer program that works correctly under all required conditions, it is easy to build one that works 90 percent of the time." He then notes "how inappropriate it would be to build an airplane that flies 90% of the time."
The world's slowest computer might be its most important
For 80 years, computer engineering has been a race to build smaller, faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient machines. The fastest operational computer can transmit the entire world's internet traffic in under 3 seconds. Nobody asks: what's the slowest and most energy-inefficient computer in the world? Nobody celebrates computational difficulty. Yet Bitcoin enthusiasts do exactly that — they celebrate how computationally expensive it is. Why? Because the energy IS the feature.
Turn the power grid into a planetary computer
The global electric power grid — the world's largest, heaviest, most energy-intensive piece of infrastructure — could serve as the circuit board of a planetary-scale computer. Bitcoin utilizes the planet's energy resources as a state-changing mechanism and the globally-distributed power grid as its motherboard. "To create the world's largest, heaviest, most energy-intensive, and most physically-difficult-to-operate computer ever built, we could simply utilize our planet's energy resources as the controllable physical-state-changing mechanism of a planetary-scale computer."
"Satoshi opened a portal between two realities"
Michael Saylor observed: "Satoshi opened a portal from the physical realm into the digital realm, and energy began to flow into cyberspace, bringing life to a formally dead realm consisting of only shadows and ghosts — bringing conservation of energy and matter, objectivity, truth, time, and consequence into the digital realm. Delivering property rights, freedom, and sovereignty...." Before Bitcoin, cyberspace had no physics. Everything was abstract, controlled by administrators. Bitcoin imported the physical world's constraints into the digital world.
Nakamoto didn't just solve a computer science problem
Satoshi Nakamoto didn't just solve the Byzantine general's problem — how to get a distributed computing network to agree on the state of a ledger. Nakamoto appears to have gifted the world "a non-kinetic (thus non-lethal and non-destructive) form of globally-scalable warfighting, which they can use to establish their dominance hierarchy just like all animals utilize physical power to establish their pecking order." Bitcoin does what Einstein claimed possible: it swaps matter for energy, imposing severe physical costs by passing charges across resistors instead of forces to displace masses.
El Salvador: the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as a strategic asset
Nations like El Salvador have already started adopting Bitcoin to secure their "property, policy, and freedom of action in cyberspace against nuclear-armed superpowers." Meanwhile, other countries like Russia appear to be pivoting to do something similar. The thesis asks: "How many nations need to make these types of strategic pivots before we (the United States of America) acknowledge this technology represents something far more strategically valuable than just peer-to-peer cash?"
Carl Sagan warned us about this exact moment
Carl Sagan prophetically warned: "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public can even grasp the issues." The thesis argues we are living in the exact scenario Sagan described: a digital-age society where programmers wield extraordinary abstract power over society's most precious resources, and the public doesn't even understand the threat.
Fidelity's game theory: adopt or be left behind
A 2022 Fidelity Report stated: "We also think there is very high stakes game theory at play here, whereby if bitcoin adoption increases, the countries that secure some bitcoin today will be better off competitively than their peers. Therefore, even if other countries do not believe in the investment thesis or adoption of bitcoin, they will be forced to acquire some as a form of insurance." The same logic applies to every historical power projection technology — those who adopt late suffer.
Bitcoin under the Second Amendment
Lowery argues that current efforts to ban Bitcoin could be a violation of the Second Amendment. In the information age, the technologies people use to physically secure what they value are changing, but "the intent of the second amendment should not change." If Bitcoin qualifies as a non-lethal, electro-cyber security system — a digital armament — then Americans should have the right to bear that arm. "Trying to ban Bitcoin on the grounds that it uses too much energy could be a blatant affront to American values."
Electro-digital antlers: Bitcoin's ultimate purpose
The thesis closes with perhaps its most evocative idea: maybe humans just need to evolve their own version of antlers. Deer use antlers to compete physically but non-lethally to establish dominance hierarchies. Bitcoin could serve the same function — "a way for humans to establish intraspecies dominance hierarchies and determine the right balance of power using non-lethal (i.e. electric) physical power rather than lethal (i.e. kinetic) physical power." If valid, "Bitcoin would not be a waste of energy; Bitcoin would be worth every watt."
JFK, EO 11110, and the bullet that proved abstract power is imaginary
President Kennedy was among the most abstractly powerful people alive when he signed Executive Order 11110, which attempted to replace Federal Reserve notes — money issued by a private institution — with silver certificates issued by the US Treasury. Five months later, he was assassinated. Whatever the true motive, the event demonstrated something profound: "President Kennedy had far higher rank and far more abstract power than the person who took his rank and abstract power from him, but it didn't protect him because abstract power is merely imaginary power — rank doesn't stop a speeding bullet."
From egalitarian tribes to god-kings: how abstract power was invented
Pre-Neolithic humans lived in "remarkably cooperative and egalitarian societies, with leaders who could not order their followers around, leading instead by example." Everyone had a similar burial ritual. Then, after the invention of agriculture, "disproportionately gaudy graves emerged, packed full of gold." God-kings wielding enormous amounts of abstract power appeared. As anthropologist Peter Turchin describes: "they oppressed us, enslaved us, and sacrificed us on the altars of bloodthirsty gods. They filled their palaces with treasures and their harems with the most beautiful women in the land. They claimed to be living gods and forced us to worship them."
Agriculture's dark bargain: trading caribou hunts for killing each other
Lowery argues that agriculture — celebrated as humanity's greatest advance — had a devastating dark side. Humans traded their freedom as nomadic hunter-gatherers for sedentary farming, creating enormous resource abundance that needed to be controlled. "They traded the burden of having to chase down caribou with the burden of having to kill each other at unprecedented and unnatural scales to keep their arbitrarily partitioned plots of highly vulnerable irrigated land safe." As Charles Foster summarized the trap: "We managed to produce a lot of calories in one place. That caused a population explosion. Once the population started to increase, there was no way back."
Timur the Great: when pacifists literally dig their own graves
Timur the Great, a son-in-law descendant of Genghis Khan, was generally undefeated in battle. An estimated 5% of the global human population was killed during 14th-century Timurid conquests. "Some cities fell so quickly that Timurid armies didn't even need to kill their contenders or haul their bodies to their graves. In some cases, the conquered would dig their own mass graves and then be buried in them while still alive." Lowery uses this to illustrate a fundamental flaw with pacifism: "pacifists literally dig their own graves."
"It's impossible to counterfeit watts"
Lowery contrasts abstract power (rank) with physical power (watts) and identifies a critical asymmetry. Abstract power — rules of law, voting systems, monetary policy — can be systematically exploited: "Rule makers can meddle with the rules, bait-and-switch the rules, or deliberately design their logic to have exploitable properties." But physical power is immune: "It's impossible to counterfeit watts. It's impossible to meddle with the properties of watts or bait-and-switch watts. It's impossible to gerrymander watts. There is no way to veto someone's watts or make one person's watts carry more weight than another person's watts."