“Softwar” is a shitty government funded paper with no concrete claims. The one thing that bothers me most is that lowery never talks about why countries would adopt bitcoin in the first place. All he talks about is proof of work, but none of the monetary incentives of bitcoin, which would be a prerequisite for countries to embrace mining in the first place. Countries aren’t going to start mining simply because there’s PoW involved - bitcoin needs to become a globally accepted currency first to incentivize the mining. I don’t think it would take long for lowery to get behind a PoW USD CBDC.
Lopp does a good job here going into the weeds and poking holes in the thesis
https://blog.lopp.net/softwar-thesis-review/