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Jason Lowery doesnt appear to understand the technical side of Bitcoin, mining and whats actually being secured. I dont have the physical book but have a PDF. The parts Ive skimmed left me under the impression that he weaved together buzzwords but mostly nonsense. He'll do well in a gov middle management position where hes neither responsible for actual implementation or earnest strategy decisions.

DataNostrum 2y ago

I agree it's much weaker than what it was made out to be. Haven't read all of it though.

He does have a point that Bitcoin mining could be of interest in the "pissing contest" dimension of military posturing. Instead of maintaining thousands of nukes that could obliterate the world many times over (pointless except for show of strength) you can "project power" by demonstrating how much hashpower you can muster.

How exactly that hashpower could be used to digitally secure something, I did not see an answer. I guess that PoW can be used as a security building block in digital security, e.g. demanding a large PoW to gain access to a critical system, but I don't know if that's practical or affordable.

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mark tyler 2y ago

I think it’s impractical and unaffordable because A: anyone who wants to (and has enough money) can write to your “secured” database (lol) and B: even authorized users cannot reuse the PoW.

Initially I thought his idea would make sense with reusable PoW:

Status quo: prove ownership of secret key to change controlled value

Lowery: provide prove ownership of secret to move bitcoin to change controlled value

But then I realized that’s the same thing with more steps.

So if there are no control values that make sense to put behind PoW, then the “pissing contest” argument doesn’t make sense to me either, because having nukes is very much a real threat. Hashing 95% of the network hashes and censoring might be a *slight* inconvenience to the opponent (expected block inclusion in 200 minutes). The dynamics of the game aren’t attractive at all when compared to the incentive to develop a nuclear capability.