Anyone who has followed Bitcoin knows that the decentralized currency has seen a meteoric rise. Those who invested even $1,000 in Bitcoin just 10 years ago would see it worth nearly $177,000 today. And those who got in on the ground floor when Bitcoin was valued at $0.00099 in October 2009 would be literal billionaires – worth more than $68 billion.
Of course, few people might have had the stomach to invest $1,000 in cryptocurrency 15 years ago, but a $1 investment would have been like winning a Powerball jackpot of $68 million, provided they weren’t tempted to cash out years ago.
On the flip side, there are also those who suggest that the time to take the money and run could be coming as there are calls to heavily tax, or even ban the digital currency increase.
The increase in value of Bitcoin may have been an unexpected surprise to even the most serious investors, and now a book on the subject suddenly spiked in price – after the Pentagon announced it was reviewing the contents. It was reported on Monday that Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin is now retroactively the subject to a Department of Defense (DoD) security and policy review.
The book’s author is Major Jason Lowery, an officer serving in the United States Space Force, and he predicted Bitcoin could be employed as a weapon system, one of national security significance. Lowrey, who is also a national defense fellow at MIT, has suggested that the system built around Bitcoin could be used in cybersecurity. His theory may simply be one that the Pentagon would prefer not to be so widely shared.
Price Jump
After the DoD placed the book under a security review – likely out of fears that other nations could adopt the theory it laid out – the price of the book climbed faster than the cryptocurrency.
“This book professes, and teaches the practice of financial power projection and uses cryptocurrency and software as the weapons of choice,” explained technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.
“The position is well founded, and I expect it comes too close to DoD internal strategies – the DoD would focus on using the U.S. dollar standard instead – for them to be comfortable with it,” Enderle told ClearanceJobs.
A Novel Ban
This is not the first time the Pentagon has tried to keep material in a book from reaching the masses. In 2010, the DoD even oversaw the systematic destruction of 9,500 copies of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan – and the Path to Victory. The book chronicled the author’s six-month deployment as a “black ops” officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Afghanistan, and as it also revealed a bit too much, it marked the first time the Pentagon acknowledged to destroying a printed book.
The government ended up purchasing the entire print run from St. Martin’s Press, paying $47,000. However, the Pentagon acknowledged that it may have been too late to keep some of the secrets from leaking. Though the book was reissued after around 2,450 sections were blacked out and deleted, around 200 uncensored pre-release copies had already been sent out to critics and media outlets.
Those editions later sold for $2,000 or more on eBay.
Touchy Subject
Lowery’s book could see a similar price increase. Yet, the question remains whether its proposed theories are any more significant than what Shaffer laid out in his book.
“This latest developed by a DoD is surprising in some respects, but not particularly unusual,” said Irina Tsukerman, geopolitical analyst and founder of threat research firm Scarab Rising.
“It is not uncommon for the DoD to subject – even retroactively – books by serving military officers to avoid national security implications,” Tsukerman told ClearanceJobs. “It is not also entirely out of place for DoD and other security agencies to censor or subject to scrutiny published material by government officials or serving officers that may provide innovative ideas that the U.S. government has reason to believe other nations adopting the theories it sets out and wants to reduce its publication to ensure U.S. dominance in the area.”
In fact, the Pentagon’s security and policy review process is designed to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified information and ensure that published materials do not conflict with established policies or compromise operations security.
“Typically conducted before publication, such reviews assess content related to military operations, technological advancements, and national security issues,” added Tsukerman. “The retroactive nature of the review suggests the DoD may have concerns about sensitive information within the book that could impact national security or reveal protected insights. This action has resulted in limitations on the book’s availability, mandated revisions, or other restrictions until the review concludes.”
The Scrutiny Put the Spotlight on It
It is doubtful that even Bitcoin investors had heard of Lowrey’s book, and it wasn’t until it gained some interest in the investor community that the DoD took notice.
“Surprisingly, the DoD did this, as opposed to just paying the author quietly to take the book out of print, because this action puts a spotlight on the book making it more likely its contents will be used by a hostile government,” suggested Enderle.
“On the other hand, if the book contains a significant flaw, they might want a foreign power to try and fail at this but given Occam’s Razor, the former is more likely to be true – and it is never wise to bet that your opponents are stupid,” Enderle continued.
Tsukerman also argued that the DoD’s effort could backfire.
“Limiting distribution means that regular researchers rather than foreign governments with large budgets are more likely to be precluded from doing academic work,” she told ClearanceJobs. “Second, taking such a public step sends a signal that this particular theory or book is of interest and contains sensitive attention, and therefore it attracts the attention of those foreign governments, and makes it much more likely to become the subject of a chase than if it is published quietly without much fanfare.”
Changing View of Crypto?
The fact that the U.S. DoD is also paying so much attention to Lowery’s book may indicate that the government may be rethinking the value of cryptocurrency.
Tsukerman also said that is “somewhat surprising given the conservative outlook and skepticism on cryptocurrency by many economists, bankers, members of U.S. Congress, and most recent administrations. The fact that the defense and security community view cryptocurrency as a strategic asset or liability shows that despite the conventional analysis downplaying such value and reducing cryptocurrency to a tactical asset in security or other transactions is not bearing out over time, particularly as Bitcoin continues to gain in value, and the worst prognoses of its downfall have not materialized.”
However, the security establishment is distinguishing between inherent risks associated with Bitcoin and the markets and infrastructure, such as exchanges behind it, and the propensity for fraud among speculators and manipulators versus the digital asset itself and the role it can play in the national defense strategy.
“The fact that the author believes there is room for such a role beyond private initiatives and individual exchanges is telling,” said Tsukerman. “Lowery views the use of Bitcoin as a potential means to project power in cyberspace, he suggests that the digital asset could play a critical role in securing digital information against malicious actors and reshaping geopolitical power structures.”
Still, it would seem that the book could get more attention rather than less.
“By approaching the exposure this visibly they magnified, rather than mitigated, any related problem,” said Enderle. “I would hope the DoD would learn from this and find another way to suppress information they believe is hostile to the State to avoid doing the opposite.”
