The admiral just quoted our thesis on the Senate floor

Source: Dev.to

Senate testimony

On April 21st, the commander of U.S. Indo‑Pacific Command sat down in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and told them flat out that the military runs a node on the Bitcoin network to study proof‑of‑work economics. His words, not mine:

“Bitcoin shows incredible potential as a computer science tool that, through the proof‑of‑work protocols, actually imposes more costs than just the algorithmic securing of networks.”

He then called it “a valuable computer science tool as a power projection.” The Bitcoin Policy Institute press release contains the full transcript.

“Imposes more costs than just the algorithmic securing.”
— a four‑star witness chair on pricing web interaction

Pricing requests wins

Someone will always write a better bot, buy cheaper compute, or lease a proxyware pool. Pricing the request wins, because price travels with the request no matter who is holding the keyboard. Good agents pay a couple of sats and get through. Scrapers pay at volume and eat the cost asymmetry. Grandma’s TV stick isn’t going to open a Lightning channel to hammer your site, so the hijacked‑device attack stops being free.

The two‑tier version looks like this:

• Lightning – the payment rail for callers who have sats.
• Proof‑of‑work – the fallback for callers who do not, or who are not set up for it yet.

Your site does not have to pick one; you get both tiers and you set the price.

Three lines of Express

I have been shipping the “boring” version of this at the HTTP layer for a few months. @powforge/captcha is on npm, MIT‑licensed, and the PoW fallback works without you running a Lightning node. Drop it into a new project and the PoW tier carries traffic while you sort out your Lightning setup.

import express from 'express';
import { powGate } from '@powforge/captcha';

const app = express();
app.use('/api', powGate({ difficulty: 18, price_sats: 2 }));

That is the whole integration for the PoW tier. The L402 invoice tier kicks in when the caller has sats, and the prices are yours to set, not mine.

The honest question

Which is the worse bet right now: turning away a paying agent because your stack was built to block bots, or letting your content train somebody else’s model for free while you argue about CAPTCHA UX? The admiral answered that question on a Tuesday morning. The Senate just heard it. Your move.

Ship it

npm install @powforge/captcha

• Package on npm

References

• Senate hearing page: armed-services.senate.gov
• Bitcoin.com news coverage: news.bitcoin.com
• Decrypt civilian framing: decrypt.co