Jay on Nostr: Lowery introduced the idea of "chaining down" software to data stored and transmitted ...

Lowery introduced the idea of "chaining down" software to data stored and transmitted over the Bitcoin network as a means to inject Bitcoin's security properties into the software. But he never really elaborated on the topic in the thesis.

The only thing I could do is try to solve the puzzle of what that means.

What I've come up with so far is that Bitcoin provides various primitives for data encoding on-chain and over lightning.

On-Chain:
- encode data directly within the satoshis denominated by a utxo (1000 sats in a utxo has a different meaning from 1001 sats)
- encode data depending on what address a utxo is located in (moving a utxo down the derived addresses of an xpub, for example)
- encode data in OP_RETURN
- encode data in taproot witness data

Lightning
- encode data directly within the satoshis sent in a payment
- encode data in header fields in a payment

All these primitives have different properties and tradeoffs, but the on-chain satoshis denominated in a utxo offer the strongest "chain" for you to encode your highest worth control signals within. These are signals that would otherwise have to travel over pure software rails, and are vulnerable to being tampered with.

On-chain sats are the only primitive that represent a token of real power because they are the only thing in the block that prove that the sender had to either pay a fee or expend energy mining to create. Not to mention that having a number of sats locked up in a utxo so some software can anchor to that state is costly because those sats could be used for something else. Updating the state of a utxo by spending it to a different one can't be done for free the way you can update a pure-software database.

Could you say it costs money? Sure. But electricity expended to run miners isn't money despite being a real-world cost. Placing satoshis in a utxo and leaving them there is a cost too. Paying a fee to a miner looks like a monetary payment, but its cost paid in the form of tokens that represents energy expended by mining. In every case, "money" is a description of what Bitcoin is doing from a specific point of view, not what it is.

It's hard to say how these methods can be used to "use bitcoin to secure other data than itself," but it's a start. And whether you agree with it or not, it is "non-lethal violence" to make someone store your utxo on their node whether they like it or not, in a way they cannot prevent.