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"I pose to you that, should Lowery's claims be accepted and adopted by the American military, the "cure" could be worse than the disease. Let's approach Lowery's proposed future adversarially. In a worst case scenario, government miners could operate at a huge (taxpayer-funded) loss and effectively bankrupt privately funded miners all around the world. The only way a nation state can ensure that blockchain data is not censored or overwritten is to control a majority of the network hashrate. But, by doing so, they would be destroying one of Bitcoin's major strengths of its game theory - that hashpower is distributed sufficiently and incentives are aligned such that no entity has a majority of the network hashrate."

Michael Matulef 2y ago

"By focusing on hashpower, he implies that thermodynamic security is the fundamental aspect of the Bitcoin network's security model. This is incorrect and lacks nuance. There are lower levels of Bitcoin's security: the nodes that form the peer-to-peer network and the humans who collectively organize to agree upon what code they will run to secure the network.

This is why Bitcoin is fundamentally not protected by electricity, hashing machines, or even the "logical security" of nodes. Bitcoin is backed by a volunteer militia. The antifragile nature of Bitcoin as an ecosystem is because it's an open source project without a central coordinator."

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Discussion

Michael Matulef 2y ago

"Cyberspace is an extension (or layer on top) of meatspace, not a completely parallel universe. Just as how Neo could act like a god with little consequences while in the Matrix, if the Sentinels found him in meatspace, it was game over."

Michael Matulef 2y ago

"I like the story arc. I don't buy the conclusion. In fact, the entire thing appears to be a giant non sequitur. That is to say: just because you string together a huge number of valid premises, that does not mean that your inferences are logical.

Perhaps it doesn't matter what I think; I'm not the target audience. However, it is worth considering the implications of what might happen if his target audience accepts and adopts this thesis."

GHOST 2y ago

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