@OnChainFox | TAO & DeAI On-Chain Insights | Incentive Mechanisms · AI Infrastructure · Market Dynamics
North Chicago, IL
Joined April 2022
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Elio retweeted
Reposting this because @hcaulfield8148 and @OnChainFox just put words to something I have also felt for years.
Bitcoin of AI is a good. But not an explanation.
Bitcoin is easier to summarize because its purpose is an important, but narrow one.
Bittensor is subnets, miners, validators, markets, products and capital all coordinating through one network.
The complexity is not the problem.
The problem is explaining it to every level.
Everyone can benefit from intelligence that is more open, competitive and accessible. Its simple really. That's Bittensor.
Crypto:
Crypto people already understand scarcity, emissions and halvings.
What they need to understand is that subnets are not another emissions farm.
They are specialized AI markets competing to build products, attract users and generate revenue.
$TAO is exposure to that network of AI markets coordinated through one scarce asset.
Builders:
Developers care about whether they can build something useful and get paid.
Bittensor gives them access to miners, validators, incentives and distribution without requiring their own GPU fleet or a large venture round.
Build. Compete.
Earn when the network finds the work valuable.
Permissionless infrastructure for building an AI business and beyond just AI.
Businesses:
A company does not want to learn Yuma Consensus.
It wants something cheaper, faster or better than what it already pays for.
AdTAO improves advertising.
Bitsec finds vulnerabilities.
Score builds lightweight computer-vision models.
These are vendor relationships, not crypto pitches.
Here is a product that solves your problem. Btw, it happens to run on decentralized infrastructure.
Institutions:
Institutions need comparables, market structure and a defensible reason this should exist.
Not AI plus crypto. But infrastructure.
Bittensor provides economic exposure to markets across compute, inference, agents, security, storage, data and research.
And the timing is everything.
AI is concentrating inside a small number of companies and countries.
An open market for intelligence becomes the counter to this.
That is not only a crypto problem or argument.
It is geopolitical, industrial and economic one
Exchanges and retail:
Kraken listing subnet assets makes them accessible without requiring users to understand wallets, staking flows or command-line tools etc...
Retail does not need a lecture on subtensor.
They need to understand what they are gaining exposure to.
A subnet token is not equity in an AI company. Although they operate like one.
The more accurate way IMO is..
Economic exposure to a specialized AI market and the demand forming around it.
Governments:
Governments think about sovereignty, resilience and dependency.
If advanced intelligence is controlled by a handful of foreign companies, that becomes a strategic risk.
An open market for compute and intelligence creates another path.
More suppliers. More geographic distribution. More competition.
Less reliance on one company, country or political system.
Where it all comes together is this:
The subnets provide the products.
The miners provide the work.
The validators measure quality.
The market decides what is valuable.
$TAO coordinates how value and capital move through the system.
That’s really what it comes down to.
Builders need a real path to create.
Businesses need products that work.
Institutions need a case they can defend.
Governments need alternatives they can trust.
And everyday people need a clear reason to care.
The machine can stay complicated.
The story isn't.
Bittensor does not need to shrink the vision or mission.
It needs to explain it in a way people can actually understand, use and see themselves inside.
AI for the People of the World.
$TAO / DYOR.
Been saying this for years.
Yes, there are simple tag lines like “Bitcoin of AI”, etc., that attempt to condense it into a digestible vision for non-tech folks, but really making a case for the protocol in the context of the hopes and fears of AI era and explaining it in such a way that is 1) informative/educational and 2) enticing in its clarity and vision has yet to be made successfully.
I’m not sure if the lack of this is intentional on the founders’ part; to Const and Shib and others building, it’s likely hard to see the disconnect because to them, the mechanics don’t appear opaque and confusing. You can’t fix a problem you don’t recognize, in other words. But the mistake made in cases like this is that people lump the target audience into a category called “normies” and “retail” which in crypto comes with a set of assumptions—dumb, poor, incurious, meme-addicted, unsophisticated.
Yes, there is a segment that fits that description and they’re often the more noticeable. But what it fails to take into account are institutional players, large investors and even a segment of the tech industry itself that also need some translation, metaphor, and instruction to make a successful pitch stick.
More work is needed here. X community posts from tireless advocates like @bittingthembits and others helps bridge the understanding gap, but more is needed from the protocol building leadership (whether that’s OTF or founders individually or major SN owners) to package the potential and aims and mechanics of the project in such a way that it feels identifiable and visceral. Something you can see yourself a part of as either builder or investor or both.
About a year ago in a TG group for Bittensor I half-jokingly suggested something like “Clippy”, that once-ubiquitous floating paper clip that guided people through the use of Microsoft Office, as a model for something the main Bittensor website could use to guide people through the documentation and the protocol’s possibilities, overall goals, and mechanics…something to codify, clarify and translate what can feel too technically specific and overwhelming while at the same time feeling too philosophical and vague (a challenging combo for recruitment and sales, to be sure). It was understandably laughed off by most there, including one of the founders. That’s ok, but the spirit of the suggestion stands and I’m not entirely sure why we are still in this place. There are ways of communicating broad vision and specifics of a highly technical nature that converge as potent market messaging.
I can only think that a decision was made to keep it opaque in the way that an OS remains opaque despite retail having no trouble understanding a laptop and enthusiastically participating. It’s the “under the hood” stuff, in other words, not the sexy surface that matters.
The problem with that: crypto itself is already working with a deficit of understanding and a host of perceived negatives (some fair, some not) in the public consciousness—a consciousness that includes otherwise sharp and savvy institutional investors and adopters, it should be noted—and yet another seemingly complex system like Bittensor becomes unfairly dismissed as too risky because it is too ponderously complex.
I don’t think that needs to be the case.
This is not to say Const and others haven’t done amazing work as evangelists, spreading the word in conferences and prestigious talks at universities and the like, but only to say that a commitment to addressing the understanding gap in a way that doesn’t cheapen the headier pursuits can work in parallel with ultimate aims and not be at odds with it.
You can have both.
Elio retweeted
gm with a shout-out from Bloomberg 🐹
one note though
Notcoin: 35M
Hamster Kombat: over 150M 📈🚀🐹
New Telegram games like 'Hamster Kombat' show the search is on again for a 'killer app' in crypto, @MuyaoShen writes in the Bloomberg Crypto newsletter trib.al/aIx3w2J
