SOFTWAR: This Book about Bitcoin Blew me Away

I recommended this book when I only started it to few crypto friends and now that I finished it (and I’m completely blow away by it’s potential implications) I could not do the same here. My friend that is reading it loves it and is getting into programming now. I love Hal Finney quote: If yoh want to change the world don’t protest, learn how to code.

This book might be extremely important if proven right because Jason P Lowery, the Major from MIT that wrote it, theorised it that Bitcoin was created as a peer to peer monetary mean of exchange, but it could be so much more: in the book he compares gun powder that was created for potential healing properties and then discovered to be something completely different.

It also says that every empire and nation that failed to see or accept new emergent technologies, disappeared: Costantinopolis was attacked by cannons and the Emperor refused to adopt the same weapons and the city ended to be wiled out by them. China burnt all their boats in 1500 by Imperial orders (he did not like or see value in boats) and took China 500 years to recover.

The whole book is a preparation to the final chapters: he starts with examples on nature on how watts in nature are an absolute proof of an action being performed (an attack from a predator to a prey) and in the same way the proof of work makes it inconfutabile that a bitcoin has been created, but also has the double function of making it ridiculously expensive for an attacker to even try to attack.

The real shift, he says, will happen when countries understand that Bitcoin’s proof of work is not just about creating digital money. It is actually a way to protect and show power in the digital world without needing to fight wars in the physical world.

Lowery explains that just like gunpowder changed how battles were fought, proof of work could change how nations defend themselves in the future. Instead of sending soldiers to fight over land, countries could use mining power to protect their digital space. The more energy they put into mining, the harder and more expensive it becomes for anyone to attack them.

He describes a future where the Bitcoin network is not only about money but is also like a giant shield for the whole world. A shield that works because it is built on real energy and math, and no one can fake it.

If he is right, then Bitcoin’s most important use might not be money at all. It could be the first system in history that lets the whole world protect itself without violence.

And history shows that when new technology appears, the people or countries that ignore it usually fall behind (looking at you Germany) while the ones who accept it lead the future (Bhutan gets it right).

I highly recommend to read the book, you can read it for free or Amazon is printing a copy since the original prints were discontinued and the first prints are being sold for a lot of money now.

If this theory will be proven right, it will reshape the world, hopefully for the better.