Softwar: The MIT Thesis That Frames Bitcoin as National Defense
In 2023, a US Space Force officer submitted a master's thesis to MIT arguing that bitcoin isn't primarily money — it's a power-projection technology with national security implications. The argument is stranger, and more interesting, than it sounds.
BY DEREK CHU7 MIN READ
The thesis, in short
Major Jason Lowery, an active-duty US Space Force officer serving as a National Defense Fellow at MIT, submitted a master's thesis titled "Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin" in 2023. His core claim: analyzing bitcoin only through monetary or financial theory misses what he considers its more important function. Lowery argues bitcoin's proof-of-work network is better understood as an "electro-cyber security technology" — a way of projecting real physical power (electricity, computing hardware) into the abstract realm of cyberspace to defend a ledger, the same way a nation projects military power to defend territory.
What "power projection" means here
Militaries have always needed a way to make conflict costly enough to deter attackers without necessarily fighting — that's the basic logic behind fortresses, standing armies, and nuclear deterrence. Lowery's argument is that Bitcoin mining does something structurally similar in cyberspace. To rewrite bitcoin's transaction history, an attacker doesn't just need clever code — they need to out-produce the entire network's real-world energy expenditure, sustained over time. He calls this an "electro-cyber dome": a defensive barrier made of watts rather than walls, where breaching it costs a physically verifiable, extremely large amount of real energy rather than cleverness alone.
Put in plain terms: a country (or company, or individual) can't talk, hack, or out-code their way past bitcoin's ledger. They would need to physically out-spend the global mining network in electricity and hardware — a cost that scales with real-world energy markets, not with software cleverness. Lowery argues this is a fundamentally new kind of security primitive, distinct from the cryptographic-only security of a typical database or corporate network.
Why this matters beyond academic theory
The practical stakes Lowery raises are about national posture, not personal investing. If proof-of-work is genuinely a new form of power projection, then which nations control the most mining capacity, and where that hardware and energy physically sits, becomes a strategic question — not unlike naval basing rights or satellite constellations. Lowery's thesis argues the US risks ceding this ground if it treats Bitcoin mining as a niche energy-consumption issue rather than a technology with the same category of national security relevance as, say, semiconductor manufacturing or GPS.
This is also where the thesis draws the most pushback. Critics — including reviewers within the bitcoin community itself — have argued Softwar is long on framework and short on concrete policy recommendations: it names a compelling problem without fully specifying what the US Department of Defense should actually do about it. The thesis was also briefly removed from public distribution shortly after release before reappearing, which fueled speculation without a clear official explanation.
WHY IT MATTERS
Whether or not Lowery's specific framework holds up, Softwar reframed a real question that national security circles have started taking more seriously: as mining hardware, hashrate, and electricity increasingly concentrate along geopolitical lines, does that concentration carry the same strategic weight as control over other critical infrastructure? The thesis is a personal academic work, not adopted US policy — but it's part of why Bitcoin mining now shows up in conversations that used to be purely about energy or finance.
What to watch next
1.Whether US policymakers reference proof-of-work or hashrate distribution explicitly in future national security or energy-policy statements.
2.Whether Lowery or other researchers publish a more actionable follow-up addressing the "what should the US actually do" gap critics have raised.
3.Whether hashrate concentration by country becomes a tracked metric in mainstream geopolitical or energy-security analysis.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Softwar thesis?
Softwar is a 2023 MIT thesis by Major Jason Lowery, a US Space Force officer, arguing that bitcoin's proof-of-work network should be analyzed as a power-projection and national-defense technology rather than purely as digital money.
What does Lowery mean by an "electro-cyber dome"?
It's Lowery's term for the idea that bitcoin's mining network turns real-world electricity into a costly, physics-based barrier around the ledger — attacking or rewriting it requires out-competing the network's energy expenditure, similar to how a physical defense system raises the cost of an attack.
Is Softwar an official U.S. government position?
No. It was Lowery's personal master's thesis, produced while he served as a U.S. National Defense Fellow at MIT. It reflects his own theoretical framework, not an adopted Department of Defense policy.
SOURCES & DATA
Opinion of the author. See his full bio and disclosures. Education, not financial advice.
TERMS IN THIS STORY
Derek Chu
Bitcoin Almanack's editorial byline for on-chain data, holder behavior, exchange flows, network activity, and technical market structure.
Sources, standards & corrections
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Sources are linked inline. Read our editorial information, AI disclosure and corrections policy, or report an error.