Beyond Money, Hedge, and Energy: Evaluating Bitcoin as Power Projection Technology

Abstract

In March 2025, the United States established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by executive order. Bhutan had been quietly mining Bitcoin with hydroelectric power, accumulating over $1 billion without public announcement. By February 2026, more than 145 publicly traded companies held Bitcoin on their balance sheets, collectively exceeding one million BTC. No established academic framework predicted these developments. In his 2023 MIT thesis Softwar, Major Jason Lowery proposed that Bitcoin is best understood not as money or a hedge but as a power projection technology rooted in thermodynamic proof of work. This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of that framework. Nine falsifiable predictions are tested against observed data; five have been confirmed and one partially realized within three years of publication. The developments that monetary, financial, environmental, and security models fail to explain (strategic reserves, geopolitical competition for hash rate, sovereign mining operations) are precisely those the power projection framework predicts.