The Pomp Podcast - #866 Bitcoin Is A National Strategic Defense Issue w/ Jason Lowery

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

Jason Lowery is a member of the U.S. Space Force and is a National Defense Fellow at M.I.T. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, its role as a National Defense strategy, and how it all relates to the current conflict overseas. ======================= Bitcoin 2022 is the LARGEST Bitcoin event in the world that takes place April 6th - 9th in Miami Beach, Florida. All four days will be jammed-packed with exclusive content, exciting announcements and an incredible lineup of bitcoin speakers, artists and leaders. Day 1 is INDUSTRY DAY for enterprising bitcoiners who are looking to build a business or career within the ecosystem. Days 2 and 3 are general conference days featuring speakers like El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, CEOs like Michael Saylor, Elizabeth Stark, Jack Mallers, Adam Back and hundreds more.  The conference caps off on the fourth day with the world's first and largest Bitcoin Music Festival - Sound Money Fest headlined by rapper and fellow bitcoiner Logic, featuring artists K.Flay, MØ, Royal & the Serpent, Apashe, Asadi and more. Stay tuned for the upcoming lineup announcement! Last year’s conference SOLD OUT and this year’s is on pace to be 3x larger so make sure you grab your tickets before it's too late.  Visit http://b.tc/conference to learn more. Ticket prices increase on JAN 14th, use promo code POMP for 10% off and I will see you in Miami!ire ecosystem bringing utility to #NFTs. ======================= Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 crypto browser. No extension required. Store, manage, and grow your portfolio, get NFT & multi-chain support, and more.  Download the Brave privacy browser at brave.com/Pomp, and click the wallet icon to get started. =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off jason lowry is a u.s national defense fellow researching bitcoin he's also an active member of the united states space force in this conversation we talk about bitcoin national defense proof of work mining and the importance of bitcoin in a changing geopolitical landscape jason's one of the great minds of Bitcoin, and I'm glad that he's here in the industry and publicly sharing many of his thoughts. I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you

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click the wallet icon to get started. Today's episode is sponsored by the Bitcoin 2022 Conference. Bitcoin 2022 is the largest Bitcoin event in the world that takes place April 6th through the 9th in Miami Beach, Florida. All four days will be jam-packed with exclusive content, exciting announcements, and an incredible lineup of Bitcoin speakers, artists, and leaders. Day one is industry day for enterprising Bitcoiners who are looking to build a business or career within the ecosystem. Days two and three are general conference days featuring speakers like El Salvador president, Nayib Bukele, CEOs like Michael Saylor, Elizabeth Stark, Jack Maulers, Adam Back, and hundreds more. The conference caps off on the fourth day with the world's first and

largest Bitcoin music festival, Sound Money Fest, headlined by rapper and fellow Bitcoiner Logic, featuring artists Kay Flay, Moe, Royal, and The Serpent, Apache, Asadi, and more. Stay tuned for the upcoming lineup announcement. Last year's conference sold out, and this year's is on pace to be three times larger. So make sure you grab your tickets before it's too late. Visit b.tc slash conference to learn more. Again, that's b.tc slash conference to learn more. Ticket prices increase on January 14th.

Use promo code POMP for 10% off and I will see you in Miami. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POMP Investments.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, we've got Jason here with us. Jason, what's going on, man? How are you? Good. Hey, Joe. Hey, John. Jason, how are you? We're super excited, man. We got a lot to go through. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready if you're ready. All right, let's start first with I want to kind of set the scene before we start talking about some of the nuances of Bitcoin, proof of work, national defense, et cetera. Obviously, this stuff's really hard to talk about. It's complex. There's all sorts of nomenclature

that is very specific. People interpret different terms, different ideas differently. Help us understand just like how you think about talking about this stuff and the language that's used as we kind of go into the conversation. Yeah. So this is where my background comes in really handy. So I'm an astronautical engineer in the Space Force and also a national defense fellow at MIT. So my job is quite literally to understand the emerging technologies out there and how they could affect national security in the future. And in previous jobs, for example, when I worked at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, my job would be to basically reverse engineer foreign electronic warfare systems, explain their significance to diverse audiences who don't have backgrounds in electronic warfare, to include the POTUS daily intel brief. So I know a thing or two about explaining the strategic implications of emerging technology to policymakers.

And so when I came to MIT, that was my goal from the very beginning. We were, as a National Defense Fellow, I'm required to understand or write about the strategic implications of emerging technology. And I chose Bitcoin specifically for reasons that we'll talk about during this podcast. But the bottom line there is when it comes to explaining any technology, even the easiest and most simple technology, it's actually really, really awkward and really difficult to do. And I have I thought it would be fun to to prove this, to prove how awkward it is to explain how technology works by basically quizzing you, if you'll let me. I mean, I don't think I could say no. I didn't know we were going to do this, but let's try.

okay this by the way is uh me getting absolutely demolished i'm going to call it in advance of an mit national defense fellow and a active space force uh uh now i'm interested in seeing what jason pulls up here go ahead so so all the brothers should participate in this okay so here's a little game show there you go smart asses so i just went around my house and picked up some technology and i want you to explain to me the significance of this technology so here's technology number one what what is that sugar this is uh it's a cinnamon and sugar inside all right uh basically it makes the food taste well uh tastes good and and also preserves the food for long periods of time so you're describing what the technology does explain

to me what this technology is uh it is a cylinder with a hole with a cap that has holes that gradually let the substance through okay so that's that's better that's better you're talking about the form of this technology it's a clear cylinder it's a clear container of some kind with holes in the top and what's the purpose of the holes to let the substance flow through when i turn it upside down it'll come out and it'll make a mess but you'll notice that when it comes out it it's a gradual flow right by constraining the flow when i turn this thing upside down it comes out at a a smooth, predictable pace. So what's the value of this technology in our life? Well, it depends on what the economic output is that you get from using it.

Yeah. It has different value. I'm one for two. It has different value depending on how you use it for. If I fill this with salt, it has different value. If I fill this with pepper, it's got different value. If I fill it with cinnamon and sugar, the value that this brings to my life is it makes a nice, even flow of cinnamon and sugar on my toast but but if you didn't have history to tell you this and and this was the first time you'd ever seen this technology it would have been harder so that was test number one i'm going to test you again fantastic same technology same form now explain

this to me oh that's time what are you talking about what what is this technology describe what it is it's two symmetrical cylinders that allow another substance to flow through at an even rate okay so what's the difference one number of holes is the difference uh shape is a difference made out of the same material for the most part yeah so instead of a bunch of holes it's got a single hole and that hole is created by basically pinching the container and so when i spill this upside down it falls on the floor or on my toast because i want it to when i turn this upside down that flow of particle on the inside is captured okay so obviously the value that this brings to our life versus this is that we don't lose what's in here right that must be the value

because that's the difference correct but is that actually the value that it brings to our lives no what is the value that it brings to our life well i want you to know it's how they're used okay keep going i don't know man i got c's and d's in school so so these are basic technologies and it's awkward already awkward correct it's difficult it's difficult to unpack not just in the way that we talk about in everyday life but actually to, in some way, view them both from an engineering standpoint of the actual technology form factor, but also in the application of that engineering? By taking this, by putting one hole and capturing it on the other side,

the value that this brings into our lives transcends the parts. It's more than the sum of its parts. We create this magical property where we can now partition time itself. We can transform sand into time itself and track the passage of time, time to come and time past. That is amazing. That is miraculous by just this simple thing. But if you go around and you talk about what technology is, literally what technology is, and not the emergent property of that technology, the value it brings to our lives, you will draw very different conclusions about what this technology is useful for. Would you agree? I would definitely agree. And so now take this problem, but take it away and make it software. So it's invisible.

Now you have to describe how software works, what its form, what its emergent properties are. And that gets really freaking hard, really fast. Correct. Right. It becomes triple awkward because technically the function of all software is identical it it is simply to sell to tell a discrete state machine what state to be in zero or one that's what all software does right that's that's exactly it's purpose okay and technically the the form so not only the form um is the same also so the form of technology is just a set of instructions to tell a state machine what to do so that gets super confusing right And by the way, everything, everything that we use to describe software, to include programming

language, to include this idea of while loops and for loops and routines and subroutines and clouds, right, or containers and all the things that we use are just abstractions. They're just metaphors because the literal form of software is just instructions that tell a discrete state machine what to do. So we have to formulate these abstractions, which may not be accurate. the cloud is not really a cloud just someone else's computer it's just how we deal with that complexity okay so there's two more technologies that i want to quiz you on are you ready yeah i guess because we're gonna we're gonna take the awkward game up a notch okay because we're gonna

get into a politically sensitive technology oh fantastic there's not a controversy we didn't like on this show go ahead okay explain to me what this does oh that's a killing machine okay that's one way to look at it right now well it's a sharp blade that has a multitude of it's a sharp blade with a what is that a rubber handle or something yeah hard plastic hard plastic yes so do i use this to chop up my salad probably not right what do i use this for i mean violence so if i'm i used to live in vandenberg if i'm taking a hike in the mountains of vandenberg you want this thing on your side because you're probably going to see a mountain lion while you're out there so okay so so first of all let's describe what this technology is

it's a hunk of metal yep and if you apply energy to it it converts energy into what we'll call property defense. So this is a hunk of metal. I apply some energy to it with my hand and I have a way to physically stop attackers, whether it be a mountain lion or whether it be someone else, a person, right? Would you agree that's an empirically accurate way of describing this technology? I would. Okay. I'm also impressed that you're going to fight a mountain lion with a knife, but keep going. I'll lose, but keep going. Maybe if it's like really small or something. I'm in the Space Force. I'm not in the Army. Let's just put it that way. But the point is, this technology has a form. The form is a hunk of metal. I apply some energy to

it. I'm able to not only physically stop attackers, but also deter them. I flash this thing, and maybe someone will back off because they know I'm threatening harm to them, or I'm showing that it will be cost prohibitive to try to attack me. You might be able to succeed. The mountain lion might be able to get me, but not without a couple of cuts along the way. Correct. Okay. Explain to me what this technology is. Jeez, that is a piece of metal that has a lot of energy applied to it very rapidly and seems to be unstoppable in many cases. Okay. Would you agree this is a hunk of metal that converts energy into property defense. Yes. Very, very accurate. For those who are just listening, by the way, he's holding up a gun. So I put some energy into this thing. Energy is

contained, not in my arm, but contained in this capsule. Yep. Right. I put some energy into this thing and I can stab people with the, with the bullet at the front of it. Right. So it's, it's basically a knife at uh arm's length away yeah so so now in this awkward conversation of trying to explain how technology works even when we can see it even when it's clear even when we have intuitive understanding because this technology has it is older than all of us so we we were born and raised understanding what this technology is for it's still hard to describe correct because these have the same function but they have completely different form Yep.

Okay, so is the knife the same as the gun? In form, no, but in the function of defensive property rights, it is. Exactly. So now I've shown you two examples. MIT needs to give me a freaking degree. Yeah. Right? Similar form, very different function.

Would you agree? Yes. Okay. Similar function, very different form. Would you agree? Yes. The gun and the knife are very similar functions, but different forms. Okay. So when that happens, we give it another name. Let's call this a weapon. Would you agree they're both weapons? Yes.

So we use the term weapon to show that these things have similar function, albeit different form. Now, have you ever heard the term, don't bring this to a this fight? Yep. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, of course. Why? Why is that an idiom? Why do people say that? Well, the gun may be a little bit more effective at the violent conflict than the knife is. So let's use less politically sensitive terms, because when I say the word violence on Twitter, things don't go well. So which one is cheaper? Which one is cheaper? Well, depends on what gun you buy, but probably the knife.

This is about 100 times more expensive than this one. Which one uses more energy? The gun does. So it's more expensive and uses more energy. Correct. But it's more effective. Right. And so we can measure that effectiveness through a term that we call power. We can literally measure the watts that I can project by stabbing. And I realize how ridiculous I look right now. I'm looking forward to the thumbnails on this. But the point is, this is way more powerful than this. Correct.

Which is why you would never want to bring this to a, this fight, right? You would never want to bring a knife to a gunfight, especially if your adversary, especially if someone else is trying to, who is trying to take your property from you is carrying this, not a knife. Okay. Do you understand that concept? Yes. Pretty straightforward. Correct. Okay. So, so some might call these, I think it's also an accurate way to call this a denial of service countermeasure. If someone's trying to deny you service to your property, this is a countermeasure against it. Would you agree? Yes. It's pretty effective. Hopefully only used in a time where the denial of service is very, very, very serious, not just John can't get McNuggets at McDonald's.

That's a great point. So let's talk about that. If you want to defend something, you've got three options. The first option, the most energy efficient, the most cheap option to defend your property is a concept we call trust. I will simply trust my neighbor. It's very energy efficient to do that. That's why trust is so important in societies. If you have a high trust society, you have a very efficient society. But there's something wrong with trust. There's a security flaw with trust. If your neighbor decides to break your trust, you have no way to defend yourself. You have to find a way to project power to defend yourself. So your other two options for defending your property are you defend yourself through this technology,

or you hire someone to defend you through this technology. Correct. Does that make sense? Yep. Either self-defense or you have police, security, whatever it is. Exactly. So this, to me, the reason why I'm carrying this is for self-defense. I don't trust my neighbor. Actually, let's say this. I do trust my neighbor, but this is how I verify, right? If they break my trust, to your earlier point, if they break my trust, this is how I verify that I still have the means to defend myself, okay? And it's not just a deterrence mechanism. I can literally physically stop the attacker. I'll give them one courtesy shot over the shoulder out of respect for their life, but the second one is not going over the shoulder.

That's how you can guarantee that you are in a zero-trust position. You have zero trust and egalitarian control over the property that you're trying to defend. If you do not have this mechanism or some other form of the same mechanism, you do not have zero-trust control. You must find a hunk of metal that converts energy into defense. Correct. Okay. So explain to me. This is the final challenge.

Are you ready? Yeah, I can't wait. Okay. The last time you did this, you pulled up a gun. Oh, this time you pulled up a digital defense mechanism, which is a Bitcoin miner. What is that? A Bitmain? What is that?

An S19? I don't actually have a real one, so I had to print off a picture. If anyone wants to donate me a broken one for the school, you're welcome to do so. But this technology, would you agree? it's empirically valid to say this technology is a hunk of metal that converts energy to property defense. Correct. And probably does it better than anything else in the world. Okay. So what do we call something that has the same function, but a different form? A weapon. I'll let you decide. Because when I, when I wear, you know, when the U S national defense fellow goes on air

with approval from the Pentagon wearing a uniform to talk about Bitcoin as a weapon system. It's extremely controversial to do that. I'm the first and only one that I know of in any academic institution that is treating Bitcoin this way. And I started this well before the national strategic military implications of this technology showed itself on the world stage so clearly. So what are those? Hold on a second. This is important. Explain a little bit about, without getting into any one of the current situations, explain a little bit as to how you think about the national strategic defense implications of Bitcoin itself from like a US perspective. Well, this is where it comes down to this conversation that we talked about earlier.

form software is tricky everything about software is hard it's invisible it's inherently unintuitive it's complex and confusing the size and complexity of software scales to the point where it can have infinite states it can be it's like proteus it can take any shape and it can run through like every time a software runs a new subroutine it's technically a wholly different thing and you can have thousands of subroutines in a single piece of software. Two people can have two different abstractions and both be correct when they describe the form and function of software. Remember, because these are just abstractions. Software is only a set of instructions that tells a discrete state machine what to do. So if you call it gold, but I call

it a gun, neither of us are technically incorrect. More importantly, software can perform two functions at once okay so i get accused all the time of being a hammer that looks like that looks at bitcoin like it's a nail and but but the implication being well obviously it's a monetary system so so the screwdrivers are calling it a screw the hammer's calling it a nail and people don't understand that it can be both things at once at the same time it's software that's It is both things at once. Well, so, and so, so you remember your question was about explaining the national strategic implications of, of Bitcoin.

If you want to understand it, don't look at the software, look at the hardware piece, look at the thing that everyone can see. This is how you describe the national strategic implications of Bitcoin. This is how you explain why there is no replacement for Bitcoin. People, both animals and people, have been trying to search for a substitute for this. Humans have been doing it for 200,000 years. A way to defend their property more effectively. And by the way, the more energy you use, the better your defense is.

That's why you don't want to take a knife to a gunfight. Energy is good. The power that you project, the more powerful a hunk of metal is that defends your property, that protects it against denial of service attacks is good. And by the way, this allows you to actually physically stop an attacker, a denial of service attacker. It's not just a deterrence like proof of stake. This is ability to physically stop the attacker.

So when you think of that, or go ahead, continue. So my goal from the very beginning when talking to policymakers, this is what's super frustrating. Like I said, I'm an astronautical engineer in the Space Force and a U.S. National Defense Fellow at MIT. My job, what you pay me for, is to understand what this form will be in the future and to posture this country to make sure that we have the most powerful thing, that we're not taking a knife to a gunfight in the future. And so it's super frustrating when people are talking to me about Bitcoin as if it's strictly a financial system or strictly a monetary network and acting like me that I'm not qualified to be talking about this kind of stuff. And it's also super frustrating to watch a bunch of bankers, a bunch of business people, a bunch of finance people try to explain it because then they get confused and they say, oh, it's the digital version of this. and it's like you could have a phd in economics and not understand the socio-technical implications of this in fact most of them don't right and then or they'll go well okay it's

digital energy you see we we take a state machine and we digitally partition it across a distributed ledger and the people who are allowed to write on it are the ones that find the knots and and it's like miners searching for gold and then we act surprised when a bunch of people get freaking confused about what you're doing. Or if you treat it strictly as a property, they're going to say, why, what makes Bitcoin different? What makes Bitcoin different than any other type of digital property or digital asset out there? So my goal is to just take this complex technology and boil it down to something that anyone with no background can understand, and then make informed policy decisions on it. Because if you treat it like a digital version of this,

your policy is going to look very different than the digital version of this. Because if you think it's just digital property, then you might say, okay, well, maybe it's a threat to USD hegemony or this or that. But if you realize that this is the future of warfare, what happens when we scale this up? And it's not just me, but now it's an entire army of people. What do we call that? War? It's called war, okay? Nations live and die and are created and are uncreated by their ability to understand what form this will take and to be good at that game in the future.

This is how we defend everything that we value. People forget this. And if a new technology emerges, if a new one of these emerges, banning it is not an option. You can't ban your adversary from using this, right? So when Orban, the engineer, creates cannons, he was the guy that invented this. He figured out how to iron cast cylinder, fill one end with gunpowder, fill another end with a bullet. He takes that technology to Constantinople and he offers to build it to Constantine.

Constantine turns him down, says he can't afford it. You see the logical flaw there? Correct. Because Orban goes to a 19-year-old kid, Sultan Mehmed, and within a year, they're shooting down the walls of Constantinople. The only, you don't get the option, right? You have to buy it. If you can't afford the Canon, you buy Orban. You buy Von Braun. Okay. So this technology has multiple selling points in history. We use it for warfare. We devise mechanisms so that people pay fees to other people to wield this technology on their behalf. Correct. And that's precisely what we're doing with this technology. People who buy Bitcoin are subsidizing the development of a new weapon system, a new defense industrial complex. And which one do you think is more ethical? Well, definitely the Bitcoin mining, the digital protection of property rights is not only more ethical, but it's also, I would argue, much more effective in achieving world peace, because at the end of the day, you end up actually knowing with almost a high degree of certainty or actually with a high degree of certainty, it is impossible to penetrate versus as we are watching right now in certain areas of the world.

Some people are confused as to you can use the gun and those types of weapons. And there's a question. Can we actually overpower another region, another army, another kind of citizenry? And when you look into the digital world, you know that it can't be penetrated. In every way that you look at this technology, the current conversation doesn't make sense. what is being discussed at the national strategic level is incongruent to what this technology is and what it represents. Obviously, the thing that projects more power, the defense technology that uses more energy is a better defense system. Obviously, the technology that can preserve

citizens' private property rights without spilling blood, without the unfortunate side effects of this is more ethical. And obviously trying to ban this from your country is only going to give your adversary an advantage over you. Read history, read what happened when Whitehead goes, invented the torpedo and the Royal Navy, the powerful Navy turned them down and said, I'm not going to invest in this technology because it represents a threat to my naval hegemony. You don't get the option not to part to turn where this technology takes you all right so let me ask you a couple of questions i want to take this from uh conceptually this is a really really big idea uh i don't think anyone else has been able to one identify and then to articulate this idea the way that you've

been able to do it obviously your background uh the current seat you sit in there's a number of things that make you uniquely positioned to talk about this. The first thing is weapons can be used for offense or defense. And last time we talked about this idea that certain situations are deemed as offense or defense based on who you ask. And so some people may look at an offensive move and say, oh, we're offensively going in doing something. And somebody says, I'm engaged in this conflict because I'm defending against somebody else who is doing something offensively. So putting aside offense versus defense. The United States looking at this technology as a national strategic initiative by miners, by Bitcoin, by it all, like what is the way in which they should be thinking

about as a policymaker? There's a lot of politicians who watch this show. There's a congressman literally coming on right after you. How should they be thinking about Bitcoin in terms of what they can actionably go do? The most important question to ask yourself about how to form your policy surrounding Bitcoin is not what you think about it, it's what other countries think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of any country that isn't NATO,

that isn't China, that isn't Russia. They're being forced into a position where they effectively have to choose which nuclear power they should subscribe to to allow those people to denial of service attacks them. So if Russia and China reprice their exports in digital yuan and get people to join the digital yuan network, that doesn't solve their denial of service vulnerability. They just choose a different network, a different sovereign power to have the ability to denial of service attack them. So it's in every country's best interest, and El Salvador knows this, to make sure that you build an army of this, to make sure that you have a hash force so you can verify, you can physically prevent anyone from denying you access to your sovereign wealth.

It's only a matter of time until everyone figures this out. The only difference between this and a war is how many countries subscribe to this protocol. And El Salvador is literally raising bonds for people to fund the development of their hash force. They're already starting. The game theory has already begun. And so knowing that the United States' number one export is property defense as a service, knowing that this is the future, that could be the future of property defense as a service, you must realize that this is something that must be in your inventory if you want to continue to be a leader in property defense as a service. And if you're afraid, if you're going to sit there and think that this technology is a risk to your power projection hegemony, then the answer is you buy as much of it as possible to make sure that it's expensive for your adversary to join this network and to make sure that when they do, their capital does fly out or when they do reprocess themselves strategically, that we stand to benefit the most. And so these decisions like EU almost banning proof of work because it uses too much energy is literally then voting or not whether to disarm themselves and posture themselves for failure in the future when other countries, not your country, when other countries realize that the best way to reduce the attack surface on their sovereign wealth, the best way to have sovereignty, period, is to verify that no one can take your stuff. when you think about bitcoin through this lens bullets guns missiles tanks name your weapon of choice we can create more of them if it may cost us money it may take time it may require us to

plan correctly etc but if we want to go to war or we want to defend ourselves from war there's an unlimited number of bullets that could be created given enough time and money bitcoin is not that way. Bitcoin only has 21 million as the total supply. How does that change the analogy? Or how do you think about a finite supply versus a seemingly unlimited supply of some type of weaponry? It means that if you move first, you stand to gain disproportionately over the other ones. It's the power law. And it's very significant because not only does this reduce the amount of bloodshed that's required to defend our private property, it doesn't reduce it all the way. I'm not saying that this will replace war i'm saying it's a supplement to war we're still going to need

the old we're still going to need this stuff to defend the people who do this but but at the end of the day if nations start converting effectively subscribing to this decentralized military all these decentralized property defense industrial complex and and that and you're buying stock you're effectively buying shares in this industrial complex and those are purely limited and that scarcity is enforced through the same mechanism, then those who move first over the next 10 years, and if this truly does become the new property defense protocol that everyone subscribes to, then you are posturing yourselves to become a superpower for the next thousand years. The asymmetric advantage of the first mover cannot be understated if it's true

that this is going to be the premier property defense as a service protocol that replaces or supplements this. When you think about the United States, one of the things that the U.S. hangs their hats on is obviously property rights, but also the Second Amendment, right, for the individual to bear arms. How does that play into our evaluation of this? Does that make us more likely to go ahead and understand this perspective and act on it? Does that actually put us in like an innovator's dilemma type situation where we say, oh, we already have property rights, we already have individual right to bear arms, and therefore we don't need, you know, kind of more? How do you think about that? First of all, for the innovator's dilemma, the problem is

You get disrupted. The incumbents get disrupted because they have the most, they have more to gain by continuing on their path than by pivoting and accepting the new technology. That's not true for Bitcoin. The United States has the most to gain from this. So it's not an innovator's dilemma. It's just stupid not to do it. Right? Like I studied competitive strategy at MIT, like, you know, so anyways. But I forgot what the other question was. Oh, second minute. Yeah, Second Amendment. So what is the purpose of Second Amendment? Why did our forefathers put it in there? What was the intent? To allow us to protect ourselves from the overreach of anybody, whether it was our neighbors, our government, or anybody else. Our forefathers recognized that you need to decentralize this because if you don't, then you put yourself at a systemic vulnerability where the people who wield this can denial of service attack the citizen's property. So if only the state is allowed to own this technology, then that's a security vulnerability for the citizens. It's a denial of service security vulnerability for your property. So to protect people against that, they allow us to hold this technology to help decentralize this power projection so that one organization doesn't have 51% control over, or at least to decentralize it somewhat. And so to that end, the right to mine at your house, it should, in my opinion, be protected under the Second Amendment. And then how does the idea of software as free speech play into this, which is another kind of core tenet of the American experience or American democracy?

There's plenty of precedent where software has been deemed free speech. Bitcoin as the asset is obviously software. And so is there not only protection for things like minors under potentially the Second Amendment, but also the First Amendment protects your right to exhibit or exercise your free speech in using something like this? So, again, software can be multiple different things at the same time. It can be a weapon system. It can also be a language that should be protected under free speech. The problem you get with this is the government could say you still have the right to free speech because we're still letting you use cryptocurrency. It's just now you're using our CBDC. So you have to look at the you have to take a kind of adversarial viewpoint.

Again, military officer, I'm going to take this viewpoint. When you have Michael Saylor and Nick Carter and all these awesome people trying to fight off the ESG flood by pointing out how green the energy usage is, they're effectively Sisyphus. They're just trying to roll this ball uphill doomed because that argument will never defeat the Bitcoin uses too much energy argument. Because you could say that Bitcoin is powered exclusively by the magic of carbon captured unicorn farts, and people would still say it uses too much energy. People would still say it wastes too much energy because they're viewing it as this. And they say, well, there's a lot more inefficient ways or a lot more efficient ways to have that than they view it like this. No one complains about the energy consumption of the US military. It would be really stupid to say our military is too powerful because that's the point. It would be really stupid to say our military is expensive because that's the point, right? The fact that you aren't being attacked, it makes it look expensive because you're not using your military. They're just like training and practicing. And then you'd be like, why are we paying them so much just to stand around and train and attack? But the fact that no one is attacking you is proof that all the energy that goes into training, all the money that goes into building the military is not wasted. Just like the energy that goes into defending Bitcoin against denial of service attack from people taking advantage of the systemic vulnerability of the longest chain is valid chain consensus protocol.

The fact that that isn't taken advantage of is proof that the energy spent to defend it from denial of service attack isn't wasted. and so so step number one is if you try to take the esg like it's more efficient then it's your sisyphus you're rolling the ball uphill just like if you try to take the well it's protected under free speech you're still sisyphus you're rolling the ball uphill because you aren't addressing the most important part about bitcoin the thing that makes it different than anything else all these other technologies don't have this and they'll say well we can still protect your right to free speech, but use altcoin, use Pompliano coin instead of Bitcoin. No, we don't have that.

But do you see the point? Like I can sit here and I can make, like give me like a couple of minutes and I'll make a scarce digital asset. Yep. It ain't going to be like more powerful than that. Like it, it, it's the value that makes Bitcoin special is not the digital asset. The value that makes Bitcoin special is the enormous defense industrial complex that preserves zero trust and egalitarian control over the digital asset, because no other digital asset has that, especially not proof of stake assets. Correct. Joe, John, what questions you guys got?

Jason, if you were able to wave a magic wand, and when you talk to these policymakers, makers, they understand it right as a weapon instead of a monetary network or system. What would be like some of the first things that you would implement if you were in their position? If I were the king for the day, that's the question. Pretty much. I mean, at the very least, like I would try to do whatever I can to make people understand that the people who are taking the risk, the regulatory risk to stand up hash forces, commercial hash forces across this country are heroes. They are defending our private

property rights and we should recognize them as such. And they're taking the risk despite all the FUD, despite all the threats of EU banning stuff or POTUS executive order banning stuff. They understand and appreciate the importance of this technology and they're taking that financial risk. And so king for the day at the very least is like, stop calling them, stop villainizing them as being like anti-ESG or something like that, because like ESG also means not just energy, but like the value to society and the value to society of defending your property with this is way more. So that would be step number one. Step number two is then we have to figure out, okay, now that we recognize that this is very, that this could very well be the future of power projection,

the future of warfare. So now we've got, you know, we've got space force, we've got air force, we've got Navy, we've got Army. How do we make sure that all countries have the maximum digital asset property to defense as well? And so that's a tricky policy-making question, but that's a much different policy-making question than what the current conversation is. Because the current conversation is a bunch of people who don't understand software getting confused. We're not even close to the point where we can actually have an informed discussion on what the proper policymaking response to Bitcoin is until people understand it for what it is and what makes it special compared to everything else. And so I'll explore a little bit of this

in my thesis. I'm going to try to think about, okay, well, if we live in a future where all countries have what are effectively hash forces, what might be, will probably be mostly commercial hash forces, hopefully mostly commercial hash forces to kind of protect against 51% attacks. But in that future, do we as a country need to do anything to make sure we can still secure these people the old fashioned way? So to put it bluntly, in a future where all nations have hash forces, you might get in the, if there's ever a bad guy that would try to denial of service attack Bitcoin by 51% attacking it, their fear shouldn't be, oh, well, you know, people might build this to physically stop me.

Their fear should be NATO will drop a version of this on top of their mining farm if they try to attack this network. So these are the kinds of questions that you have to start actually thinking about. And I know saying this stuff is super controversial, but we don't have time. I thought I would have way more time. And in just the six months of starting to talk about this, it's already there's already a POTUS CEO about it. And we already see it on the world stage. Gotcha. John, what do you got for us? Jason, when you think about our government and specifically, what is the gameplay here? Is it just accumulate as much as possible? Is there an infrastructure play?

And then if the U.S. or another country does this, what like what is the opposite? What do every other country do? So if you ban Bitcoin, you give every other country a head start. You see their development of this and you benefit them to your expense. OK, so every country is already asking themselves, should we exit this denial of service network that is very clearly a denial of service, that is very clearly weaponized? and and so that represents a a big old um capital flight risk now just and so it's important to remember technology is part of the environment the architects of the u.s financial system don't get to control the environment they can only control how they posture themselves and their

systems in response to an environment so if if bitcoin is part of the environment if if it's a mountain and you're and the policymakers are flying an airplane at the very least don't the play shouldn't be point your airplane at the mountain and then blame the mountain for the crash, right? At the very least, posture yourself to not hit the mountain, or if you hit the mountain, you benefit the most. So what I mean here is imagine that everyone in the current financial system is in a burning theater. We're having our monetary savings being burned or a little bit by the inflation, or we're now facing a risk where other nations might exit the theater en masse. So that's a capital flight risk. How do you protect yourself against that? You buy the thing on the opposite end of the exit door so that when that capital flies out of the system, you recapture that purchasing power on the other side.

So the United States, at the very least, the only play that makes sense is you buy as much Bitcoin as possible, because if people exit, then at least you end up on the positive end of that outcome. And we're in this perfect window of opportunity because you've got the Chinas, you've got the Russias who don't see this yet. They have the opportunity of a lifetime to switch to Bitcoin and force people out of the US financial system into their system, but they're making digital wands. So they're creating all the same problems over again. And every third party country that isn't China or Russia, hopefully will be smart enough to recognize that. And so the question for these third-party countries is not which sovereign financial system to pick. The question is, how much do I want to hedge with a non-sovereign financial system? And so the United

States better posture themselves to benefit from that. And you do that by buying Bitcoin. So you capture disproportionate value and people flood into it. But you also make sure that your property that you own isn't under threat of denial of service attack if you buy it, which you insure through the same way you defend your legacy physical property. So the play is buy Bitcoin and especially banks, you should be buying up this as much as you possibly can, recognizing that this is the future of your number one export of property defense as a service. When you think about this, Jason, the last thing I want to talk about is these third-party countries. So not the U.S. and kind of what we'll consider the dominant Western system

and not China and what is probably now considered the dominant Eastern system. How much intellectual humility? So get out of the technology, get out of the financial implications, but actual clarity of thought, intellectual humility needed to say, hey, I cannot control the global reserve currency or this monetary system, this financial asset. And so the second best option is to then be in a system where nobody controls it. And there's this sovereignty that is returned to me.

Is that just literally you need your leadership if you're in one of these countries to have the intellectual humility and clarity of thought? Or are there things that people can do to help their leadership understand what's kind of playing out right now? I've got presidential advisors in my class at MIT and I've talked to them about this and it isn't really intellectual humility because you can be intellectually humble and view Bitcoin as a financial system and draw these same conclusions.

It's rational to think maybe I should ban this technology because it represents a threat to my USD hegemony. And so you can be intellectually humble and still draw the wrong conclusion simply because you're viewing the technology incorrectly. Again, the most intellectually humble person that views Bitcoin as a financial system will draw a very different conclusion than the intellectual person who views Bitcoin as a weapon system or a property defense system. and and that's really what's key i'm willing to stand up here and and take all the flack for posturing or for trying to describe bitcoin in this light because i want to show people that that this is a valid empirically valid argument that we should be taking very seriously

and and it it doesn't have to be this like ridiculous thing where we view this as like you know the threat to the united states power it's just it can be the continuation of this thing and you just and but you know again the screwdriver is going to look at it like a screw so the bankers are going to look like it look at it as screw and even with intellectual humility humility, they're going to draw the wrong conclusion. And the policymakers are going to look at it like a screw. And they're going to draw policies that treat it like a screw. But software can be two different things at once. And maybe it is a nail. And if it's a nail, holy crap, we don't have much time. Yeah. When you think about this, if you had to

answer in two sentences, you gave me a quiz, I'm gonna give you a quiz. Hopefully you perform better than I did. If you had it in two sentences, every single person watching this, when they talk to, whether it's a congressman, a senator, a local mayor, a state governor, or if they even get to talk to somebody close to the president at the national level, what are the two sentences of what they should say? Keep your sword in front of you. Your swords and your shields are fully sufficient and will prove very effective in battle. That's what I would say. Those are some of the last recorded words of Emperor Constantine XIII during the final siege of Constantinople and the end of the Holy Roman Empire as we know it. He was telling his soldiers as the cannons

were ringing out very loudly and shooting down their walls that their knives were fully sufficient and will prove very effective at battle. And every single one of the officers he was talking to knew exactly what that technology was because a year earlier, the engineer who built it came to Constantinople and met with them and offered to build it for them. So we cannot forget how history plays out.

We cannot forget that power is everything. if we want to defend what we hold value valuable and and so hopefully we can convince the people who are in charge of policy making this is the goal of my research here that they they they should at least take this seriously because we don't want to be how the end of the holy roman empire ended we want to be the superpower of the future if this is the power projection play cyber If this is how you achieve zero trust, egalitarian control over cyber property, we want to posture this country to continue to be a superpower. I think that there's a lot of people who are paying attention, starting to understand some of the things you're saying. So I appreciate you continuing to beat the drum, regardless of how much shit you get.

Just remember that the haters, they usually aren't punching down and eventually they're just future fans. So keep up the great work. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Where's the best place to send them? By the way, Pomp, you're a great example of that because I watched you get punched a lot over these last couple of years. And then when they flip and do a total 180,

you treat them gracefully. And so you're kind of a role model for me. But anyways, you can find me at Jason P. Lowry, L-O-W-E-R-Y on Twitter. I use Twitter as part of my thesis methodology where I develop core concepts and test those concepts for empirical validity. So like all these things that I was telling you, hopefully I'll get a bunch of comments and hopefully I'll get a bunch of people that say you're wrong here or you're wrong there.

And I'll read those and I'll formulate the counter arguments or I'll include those in my thesis when I when I finally write it all up. I can't wait. I'll be the first one to read it and then we'll bring you back and we'll do a whole whole deep dive on the thesis and the haters can watch from from the sidelines. So I appreciate you coming on. We'll definitely do this again in the future. thanks thanks joe john thanks jason all right later buddy thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player and if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the bitcoin or crypto industry we've got you covered head over to palmscryptocourse.com we've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry it's a three-week intensive

training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.