On April 21 and 22, 2026, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Admiral Samuel Paparo of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) spoke about Bitcoin’s potential role in strengthening the nation’s military cybersecurity. He described it as a “valuable computer science tool for power projection” and revealed that INDOPACOM is currently operating a Bitcoin node as part of its experimental work with the protocol.
The admiral’s remarks came just days after the Islamic Republic of Iran demanded Bitcoin payments in exchange for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. His use of the phrase “power projection” closely mirrored the ideas of Jason Lowery, a well-known and polarizing figure in the Bitcoin community. Lowery is the author of *Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection*, an MIT Fellow, and a Special Assistant to the Commander of INDOPACOM.
Lowery’s work, which began as an MIT thesis and was later expanded into a full book, explored Bitcoin’s cybersecurity significance and its distinctive capacity to enable “power projection” in cyberspace—a domain of national security and military strategy that otherwise lacks conventional deterrence mechanisms.
The book attracted widespread attention, earning Lowery both admirers and detractors within the Bitcoin industry. However, it was later pulled from distribution at the request of his superiors, leading some observers to speculate that its contents were considered sensitive enough that the U.S. military preferred to keep them out of public circulation.
So what exactly is the unique value Bitcoin offers in military contexts, and what does “Power Projection” actually mean here?
According to the Department of Defense’s 2002 *Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms*, power projection is defined as: “The ability of a nation to apply all or some of its elements of national power—political, economic, informational, or military—to rapidly and effectively deploy and sustain forces in and from multiple dispersed locations to respond to crises, to contribute to deterrence, and to enhance regional stability.” Put simply, it refers to a nation’s capacity to shape the behavior of other nations or political actors beyond its own borders. This can take many forms, from diplomatic and economic influence to military capabilities such as long-range missiles, drones, or a formidable navy.
The concept of deterrence plays a central role in this definition. The DoD defines it as: “The prevention from action by fear of the consequences. Deterrence is a state of mind brought about by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction.”
Lowery introduces Bitcoin into the realm of physical-world deterrence with a compelling analogy. He argues that just as microchips function as wires carrying electric power in “encoded logic” across a computer’s motherboard, the global electrical grid can be viewed as a kind of “macrochip”—with massive transmission lines carrying enormous quantities of electricity from power sources across nations and around the world. According to Lowery, these macrochips now also contain logic gates in the form of Bitcoin mining operations, which consume vast amounts of energy and convert it into a scarce digital asset programmable through Bitcoin script.
In theory, this “Bitcoin macrochip” could bridge cybersecurity concerns with the physical world, since energy production is among the most critical and costly resources a nation can mobilize. While governments can print fiat currency at will, marshaling the enormous quantities of electricity needed to influence something like Bitcoin’s proof-of-work competition is orders of magnitude more difficult—and this difficulty is precisely what underpins Bitcoin’s resilience.
Bitcoin’s Multisignature Deterrence
The most prominent and powerful example of Bitcoin’s “embedded logic” security is the invention of multisignature (multisig) Bitcoin wallets, which protect a significant portion of Bitcoin holdings today.
Multisig wallets require multiple predefined private keys to authorize valid transactions before Bitcoin can be moved, enabling the geographic decentralization of private key storage across different locations and legal jurisdictions.
This setup challenges attackers not merely to compromise a single key pair, but multiple keys spread across various locations—all under time constraints, since legitimate users have authorized access to those keys and can potentially relocate the Bitcoin quickly in response to a threat. Attackers must obtain enough keys while simultaneously evading alarms and security measures and avoiding detection. Multisig imposes substantial costs on would-be attackers and, as such, may well satisfy the definition of “deterrence.” It could even qualify as “power projection,” since Bitcoin funds can remain secure and be transmitted anywhere in the world whenever needed, thanks to Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant networking properties.
This stands in stark contrast to traditional finance and its centralized databases, where banks can freeze or confiscate assets from their rightful owners under political pressure—as demonstrated by Cyprus’s 40% bail-in or the United States’ seizure of Russia’s foreign treasury reserves held in European custody.
However, INDOPACOM did not explicitly reference Bitcoin as an asset in its comments. Instead, the focus appeared to be on Bitcoin’s proof-of-work protocol as a means of securing data and networks external to the Bitcoin asset itself. Yet Bitcoin’s scripting language—the logic embedded within the Bitcoin blockchain—only governs BTC, its native internal asset.
For external networks to benefit from Bitcoin’s powerful proof-of-work macrochip, they would need to be anchored to Bitcoin in some way. This is where much of Lowery’s thesis begins to encounter difficulties. He does, however, develop this concept further by proposing the idea of the “Electro-Cyber Dome.”
Cybersecurity Threats and the Electro-Cyber Dome
In *Software 2.5*, Lowery argues that “software system security vulnerabilities are derived from insufficient constraints on control signals” sent to networked machines. An illustrative example would be fake login attempts that cost a website significantly more computational resources to authenticate than they cost attackers to generate. Lowery adds that such vulnerabilities “can be exploited in such a way that it puts software into insecure or hazardous states.” Examples of these types of network security exploits include, but are not limited to:
- Email spam and comment spam — excessive emails and comments that flood inboxes or online forums.
- Sybil attacks — the creation of large numbers of fake identities to manipulate systems.
- Bots and troll farms — automated or coordinated accounts used to amplify harmful activity.
- Weaponized misinformation/disinformation campaigns — flooding networks with false or deliberately manipulated information.
- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks — overwhelming networks with excessive control signals (service requests) to exhaust bandwidth.
- Forged or replayed control signals — impersonating legitimate commands, orders, or data to push software into insecure or hazardous states.
- Systemic exploitation of administrative permissions/insider abuse — exploiting trust-based hierarchies where high-privilege accounts can be compromised or misused.
Lowery proposes that other networks could defend themselves against all of these threats to a meaningful degree by adopting proof-of-work (PoW) protocols similar to Bitcoin’s.
In the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin’s proof-of-work with elegant simplicity: “The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.”
Nakamoto specifically
The concept of proof-of-work (POW) in cybersecurity has deep roots, tracing back to Adam Back’s 1997 paper, “Hash Cash, A Denial of Service Counter-Measure.” Back’s original design aimed to deter email spam by requiring senders to compute a cryptographic stamp of a specific difficulty level set by the email recipient. To prevent attackers from reusing these computational stamps—a vulnerability known as a “double-spending” attack—recipient servers were required to maintain a record of all stamps already used. However, these stamps were non-transferable, a limitation that early digital currency enthusiasts, or cypherpunks, sought to overcome. Hal Finney addressed this by creating Reusable Proof of Work (RPOW), which used a centralized server to track and facilitate the transfer of these computational tokens.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s pivotal contribution was the decentralization of this tracking system. By replacing the centralized server with a distributed ledger—the blockchain—and establishing a universal difficulty algorithm for all miners, Nakamoto created a system where the “stamps” (bitcoins) were both secure and transferable without a central authority.
When discussing his “Electro-Cyber Dome” concept, Lowery is essentially describing a modern application of Hash Cash principles. He suggests that individual servers should be free to set their own difficulty requirements. While he does not explicitly mandate the use of Bitcoin’s specific SHA-256 protocol, the implication is present in his discussion of “macrochips.” Lowery frequently cites Bitcoin as the primary real-world proof that such a security model can function at scale, noting that Bitcoin successfully uses this architecture to protect its own data from systemic exploitation.
Lowery extends his thesis beyond mere defense, arguing that as these systems become widespread, they also enable a form of “offensive” capability for those with significant mining power. He points out that entities with massive hash rate resources could theoretically “smash” through the defenses of an Electro-Cyber Dome. This challenges the notion that proof-of-work protocols are purely defensive. In fact, the greatest threat to a network using a physical cost function like Bitcoin is often another entity using the same protocol, a point Nakamoto emphasized by using the word “attack” 25 times in the original whitepaper.
Criticisms of Lowery’s Softwar Thesis
Lowery’s “Softwar” thesis remains a contentious topic within the Bitcoin community. His optimistic vision—that future military conflicts could be resolved through “hash rate wars”—has been dismissed by some, such as Shinobi at Bitcoin Magazine, as “delusional.”
Critics generally argue that Bitcoin’s technology stack—including its proof-of-work mechanism, blockchain, and native asset—cannot effectively secure external data or networks. Jameson Lopp, in a detailed multi-part review of Lowery’s work, acknowledged some merits but ultimately rejected the thesis’s practical application, stating that “Softwar falls short on acting as a blueprint for how we should build the future.”
A fundamental question arises: does using SHA-256 proof-of-work to control access to non-Bitcoin networks truly constitute “using Bitcoin”? If the Electro-Cyber Dome does not require sufficient difficulty to mine Bitcoin, nor does it utilize Bitcoin’s specific difficulty targets, its native asset, or its blockchain, can it genuinely be considered a Bitcoin-based system?
Moreover, given China’s dominance in the manufacturing of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining, it seems counterintuitive for INDOPACOM—the U.S. military command responsible for the Indo-Pacific region—to secure its cyber networks using an algorithm for which China mass-produces the necessary hardware. This strategic vulnerability would likely push military planners toward alternative proof-of-work algorithms. In such a scenario, the “macrochip” argument for Bitcoin would be lost, and the system would essentially revert to a classic Hash Cash model. This suggests that Lowery’s strong association with Bitcoin may be more of a marketing strategy or a tribute to the industry that inspired him, rather than a reflection of the actual technology INDOPACOM would deploy.
The Happy Middle Ground
Between the theoretical debates and the criticisms of “Softwar”-style concepts, several emerging projects offer intriguing examples of how Bitcoin’s underlying technology can secure more than just monetary transactions.
SimpleProof, a Bitcoin-based notary service utilizing Open Time Stamps, records data hashes on the blockchain to prove that a specific version of information existed at a particular time. This precise application of Bitcoin as a timestamping server played a crucial role in the Guatemala elections, helping to defend against fraud allegations and resulting in significant real-world political consequences.
Michael Saylor has championed the development of the “Orange Checkmark” protocol, a privacy-preserving, Bitcoin-native decentralized digital identity system. While this tech stack, available on Github, generated initial interest within the Bitcoin community upon its announcement, it has yet to see widespread adoption.
Finally, in a somewhat ironic twist, Jameson Lopp—one of Lowery’s most vocal critics—implemented a proof-of-work-based spam protection mechanism on his own website’s submission form. According to Lopp, this system, which is essentially a modern take on Hash Cash, works effectively. If even a skeptic like Lopp can find practical utility in these foundational ideas, it suggests that Bitcoin-like technologies may one day play a role in securing the world’s networks and data.
