Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with it.

Here’s a direct excerpt: “In this thesis, Lowery presents a novel theory to the US Department of Defense that Bitcoin doesn't just represent a peer-to-peer cash system, it also (and more importantly) represents a new form of digital-age warfare.”

He is calling Bitcoin a form of warfare. If you take the broadest metaphorical understanding of the word “warfare,” then yes Bitcoin is war in the same sense that a game of Chess or Scrabble or competition between Apple and Google is war.

But if you consider what the word “war” means in reality, Bitcoin is the precise opposite of war. It makes threat of violence impotent via cryptography and triple entry accounting. It enables peace, not war. His thesis is false.

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Hmm. To his point, he is talking about power projection. Using physical power to defend property. Instead of using kinetic energy, bitcoin uses electricity.

If good money is the main goal of Bitcoin, which I believe it is, then hashing power is akin to 'war'. The context of what we've previously known as 'war' is killing other human beings. If the race is on to hold/create/govern the hardest money on earth then hashpower is war.

If Lowery's thesis is false (as it well may be the case), it is not because of the semantic word-play argument that you presented. He calls it a new type of warfare for specific reason. Softwar war is to be a bloodless war of power/hashrate competition. If anything, I see him as almost too idealistic, peaceful, and utopian even. I wish he was right.