Will Bittensor be Bigger than Bitcoin? | The TAO Pod

30:10What I think we could see more of is application on BitTensor. So like a subnet owner, they should think about building the application killer app, killer app, enabled by their BitTensor subnet commodity. What are raw ingredients of AI models that in aggregate, a lot of these subnets provide? So GPUs is one. You know, kind of AI, large language models that are open source and mostly free are another. Data sets is another. Data algorithms. You've got the architecture. You want to get the architecture right. You want to design the architecture right. By the way, there's two of them. They're not like way in the top 10 because they're more researchy.

30:55But one is doing neural architecture search, which basically stands, we will reward miners. for fine-tuning, tweaking the math or the attention blocks of a transformer-based neural network. And they sort of do experiments and derivations of that algorithmic stack. And when they make a small change that might be a totally new architecture or just a slightly different architecture, and they get a more performant result compared to the vanilla standard transformer, that's called neural architecture search. You're exploring the space of possibility of other architectures that could improve the model.

31:37And then, so you combine that with the training infrastructure, the data, you're saying, and the serving, hosting, the inference. And then you've got a full platform. And also agentic software. So people, so there's subnets that make agents. So given that, oh, here's the one subnet that has all the Twitter data, Maybe here's another subnet which, hey, I want to basically, whenever so-and-so posts, I want to come up with a nice AI-generated response right away so people see my response right away. So you can make your own social media agents on BitTensor using the infrastructure. I think agentic models for any possible job or task that you want are definitely going to be a really big deal.

32:27because you've got to think about how the world organizes itself today. There's like industries, career paths, jobs, skills. You want to develop your skill and you're skilled and it's like you're a great writer, super talented writer. Or you're a technical person, you know, like into math and computer science and so you're a programmer. Or you're really great with geometric structure and aesthetic and you're an architect and you're a designer of buildings and you have a great skill in that. That's what the agent could be like. You're going to need a library of agents that are tailored to the domain in which they're supposed to be just incredibly skilled at in that particular domain.

33:19And you'll need to organize and chain these together. And this is the extremely important part. You can build your agent with Google or with Elon or with Kberg or with any of the big tech companies. And your agent will be controlled by them. But if you build it on BitTensor, it's controlled by you and it's owned by you. That's pretty cool. But let me push back. What's wrong with OpenAI making my agent? I mean, I can still put it on my website. People don't even know OpenAI is in the background. I'm just using an API. So it's kind of owned by me still. The problem is it's actually not owned by you because OpenAI controls the data that the agent is trained on and all of the data that it interacts with because they control the model.

34:07And furthermore, you did not have any influence over how priors or the bias or the political leanings of that agent were designed and what it inherited. It inherited all those biases and those kinds of politicized training orientations in the sort of mega god model that it derived itself from. So it derived itself from some broader mega god model that the big tech company created that has this kind of particular political leaning that's sort of lobotomized in a very specific set of ways. right? And this is complicated. The stuff that I just said is pretty complicated. I would wager mainstream humanity is going to be sensitive to these things.

35:03That's just my hypothesis. That's my hypothesis. Well, here's like a real practical use case where you said could be important. So let me ask you if it's important. So let's take my simplistic Bible website where I just used BitTensor to make a AI Bible chatbot and I had no coding from me at all. No code experience required. Now someone wants to buy it for a gazillion dollars. And they say, well, do you own this chatbot? What if shoots use DeepSeek as kind of the backend AI model to make this chatbot? And now DeepSeek changes its API and it's no longer good. What's going to happen? The really cool thing about PitTensor is that it is going to make building James Altucher's personal mini God model for you on your entire life history data and all the things that you care about, fully owned and controlled by you in the same way that it's like you hold your Bitcoin.

36:06What if it's using an AI model though? I'm not going to have access. And then that AI model goes away. It's not going to go away. You will have ownership over the weights and the code of that model. and only you will be able to give the permission for people to have access to it. And you can train it from scratch. You don't need to build on the deep seat weights. Even though the deep seat weights are out there, training is going to get commoditized. Right now, training is a scarce, highly monopolistic market. Super monopolistic. I mean, there's like five companies doing all the training. All of them are doing the same thing, but there's two or three that are doing most of the training.

36:54Training will commoditize as a digital commodity for people that today in the same way are walking around with this type of thing in their pocket. And it is equivalent to in the 1980s or 90s, 5 million to$10 million of compute. Normal people are not going to spend 5 or$10 million on their iPhone. they'll spend$500 on the iPhone. But the amount of compute in this iPhone is$5 to$10 million worth of compute. When I was a kid, pretty crazy. It is crazy. And so I'm wondering, let's say NVIDIA GPUs, let's say that, you know, technology is deflationary in the sense that just like with the iPhone, what you could have done 20 years ago would have cost you$5 million.

37:42Now it costs you next$500. So what happens when NVIDIA GPUs become, eventually today's NVIDIA GPUs become super cheap? Because at some point, just like with the iPhone, you don't really need the latest upgrade. I don't really need to build an AI model on 5 trillion tokens. I just need 100 billion tokens, really, that I need to build my AI model on top of. So what happens when things become super easy for centralized companies to do all the AI you need? We have not scratched the surface of intelligence. your question presupposes that there will be a ceiling that we discover on the form factors and the density of intelligence that is possible to harness in the palm of your hand.

38:31We have not scratched the surface. Grok 4 used 200 ,000 GPUs for maybe six months of training and fine-tuning and billions of dollars in CapEx and$100 billion equity value in three years, whatever it is. And consumers cannot use those weights. They cannot use that AI in the palm of their hand. they have to contact Elon's data centers over the internet to get the data out of Grok's models that it's producing in Tennessee in Memphis, Tennessee right? It's like one location I mean you would literally go there and be like well I guess inferencing Grok is now in one location yeah they probably have like copies of the weights on different cloud providers and stuff but like where most of it's emanating is in Tennessee I think that we're going to be in a world very similar to the iPhone where you can access genius level personally owned AI like I think the Elon data center weights are so heavy and require so much computation just to inference them because it's 3 trillion parameters 3 trillion parameter model the mixture of experts and they're all chained together and stuff like Jeff to inference that model, to ask it a question, to interact with it, is so unbelievably that if you need it, press it to something on the size of the palm of your hand, which the arm and the custom Apple chips on this thing are, they're able to do 200 billion transistors on a chip.

40:19And there's probably 30 or 40 chips in this thing. And so you can run the math, the order of magnitude of floating port operations or flops on this thing is a fraction of what is running in that Elon data center, which is hundreds of exaflops of compute. Hundreds of exaflops of compute. Just for people's knowledge, the government-funded national laboratories like Lawrence Livermore, the big Cray super-connection meters, like these gigantic national labs, right? The average amount of computation produced by those labs is like 2x a hash or 2x a flop. 2x a flop. I've seen 2x a hash. This hash. The Bitcoin hasher.

41:082x a flop. Elon and XAI in Tennessee, we're talking hundreds of X of Glob, hundreds of X of Glob of compute. What people don't understand more though is that the Bitcoin network is 20 ,000 times more compute output than Elon's data center in Tennessee. And Elon's data center in Tennessee is the largest supercomputer on the planet currently in one location in Tennessee. Your point is that the power of decentralization gets you 20 ,000 times more powerful than a$100 billion value company for trivially less. Not only that, I'm underselling it. I'm underselling it. Tens of thousands of times more efficient outputs, yes, but also at a thousand times less cost.

42:09Yeah, it's ridiculous. The idea with BitTensor is it's the exact same decentralization and incentive mechanisms as Bitcoin, except now you could scale potentially infinitely larger than what Elon's got. We can build HGI, ASI. I don't think we're there yet. I think PhDs, a lot of PhDs are really dumb people. They're very smart in some domain, but I don't like PhDs. I like people who are free thinking and creative and they're very like orthogonal and they have like heaven specializations instead of one, right? And largely self-taught people. I would say we're probably two or three years away from intelligence in the machine.

42:53You know, that's not that long, maybe five years. To produce that level of digital machine intelligence in the computer. We need new chips. We need new architectures for the chips. We need different ways of producing energy to run those chips because we're going to run out of energy in America unless we shift to fusion or plasma or small nuclear reactors everywhere, abundantly everywhere. They have to be everywhere. We won't get there. But what will get there is potentialization, permissionless in sense. And I think we could actually use BitTensor sort of create superintelligence faster than Elon can create superintelligence.

43:39I agree. And I think, look, the idea of decentralization is that potentially every single person on the planet can contribute to what's happening. Right now, the limiting factor of a decentralized network like BitTensor is just that people don't know about it. And then once they know about it, they don't know how to use it. and there's no front door to BitTensor where it's like, here's where everything is. Here's what's needed. Here's how you could participate. There's not really like, you know how when the internet first started to get popular, I mean, the internet was around since 1971, but when it first started to get popular was when Marc Andreessen built a front door, a browser in the early 90s called Mosaic, which became Netscape.

44:26He built the first web browser where now I could see, oh, here's the internet organized. And I feel like there's no, all the capabilities are there, just like all the capabilities were already on the internet, but there was no front door. And I feel like there's not really a good front door to BitTensor right now. I fully agree with you that we are in the 1990 internet era of BitTensor. Yeah. Where we need browsers. we need platforms we need applications we need developer infrastructure it's I think as big a deal as the internet probably a bigger deal than the internet but I would say as big a deal the tensor is as big a deal as the internet maybe a little bit bigger I agree like I remember so 1995 I started a company making websites and it was because nobody knew how to make a website then.

45:27And there was no WordPress. There was no, you had to code your website. And you know, my first client was American Express. They didn't have a website. So I made AmericanExpress.com. That's where we are right now with BitTensor because everybody is going to use AI. Everyone could make an AI application without using code. You know, everybody could search all the AI is there. But right now, it's just not easy. Unless you're just using this big monolithic model like, you know, ChatGPT, which is only good for so many things. We're going to get there. The amount of development and energy in the builder community.

46:09I mean, we're talking about 100 plus teams. There's 128 subments. I think 60 or 70 of them are live. A lot of them are cooking and sort of like building their incentive mechanism and they're going to launch, and just like a startup. You go through, you have some funding, you're going to iterate a bit, you've got two, three months. Some startups take a year to launch. It's actually not uncommon, but a lot of startups take a few weeks or a couple months, then you launch a thing, a product, or whatever it is. There's a lot of subnets that are in that, but dozens and dozens of teams have already launched and they're producing a digital commodity.

46:47Mining is happening on their subnets. there's price discovery of their alpha token happening. From DTAU, which was the latest protocol upgrade for BitTensor on Valentine's Day this year, February 14, until today, so we're like 160 days, 160 days. The upnates have gone from being worth zero because the pricing discovery of alpha token started to now being worth fully diluted$10,$15 billion. in four months, four-ish months. I think that's pretty remarkable. I think it's the first time in the history of blockchain, then it's Bitcoin, that this level of activity has been happening.

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49:26so basically when people try to understand what a subnet is i think there's a very simple way to think of it it's like a company it's like an ai company that is managing to use some of these scarce resources that it can now get through bit tensor so if i wanted to start my own ai model Maybe I need data so I can go to, I can, on my subnet, the miners can supply data and the validators can make sure it's good data. So BitTensor sort of provides the things that will cost a startup a lot of money. BitTensor sort of provides it for free because there are these incentive mechanisms. And so maybe we can go through shoots and go through just kind of the economics.

50:08And also shoots is one that's easier to understand than a lot of the other subnets? I'll share my screen and then we can bounce around ever so briefly and then talk about stuff. So I'm in Tao app. This is the FDV that I've described. This is the market cap that is circulating. So FDV is the total value. These are the subnets. So this kind of looks like a decentralized exchange finance kind of like product. And we've got labels. You can see the coding subnets. You can see cryptography. So just so I understand, that middle column there that started with shoots and so on, that's all the subnets. The names of the subnets are here, exactly.

50:50So let's go into shoot. We click shoots, and their alpha token is priced at$50 currently. They've had a rough time in the last few months, but they're the number one subnet. And if we want to go to their website, click their website. And we go in their website, and you can see serverless AI compute. You can deploy, run, and scale any AI model in seconds. And they give you an account. So they're verifying you because there's a lot of traffic probably. Verify the human thing. And you create an account. You can say, create my cold key, whatever. I'm going to go and say JJ, JJ15. Create account. Continue.

51:35Great. And now I can see all the mugs. They've got a lot of models on there. Look at that. The lot labeled as HUT, which means they're probably very popular. I see. So these are like, just to explain to everybody, these are like Grok or ChatGPT, but they're open source models that Shutes has built the API to. Correct. Or the miners provide the models. Yes, exactly. And I'm looking at the... So yeah, these are all the models. The most popular ones are like DeepSeq. and Hermes, Deep Hermes from Hermes Research, Dolphin, Quen. But if we go to statistics, this is the interesting part. This is the interesting part.

52:23Since December or January last year, the number of tokens they've served, and token is like a couple words, it's not that much data, but the number of tokens they've served, this is super, super impressive, almost 10 trillion. Almost 10 trillion. This is a billion, right? A thousand billion is a trillion. This is almost 10 trillion. So a token, I just want people to understand what a token is. A token is like part of a sentence, for instance. It's some output from an AI model that's uniform. So an answer might contain like 10 tokens. Like when you ask ChatGPT a question and it gives you back a whole answer, that might have like 10 tokens in it.

53:08Precisely. So this is people talking to the model. They have 440 ,000 users. This would be a significant startup worth maybe half a billion dollars or maybe a billion dollars depending on if you monetized the tokens you're serving. And oh, this is also very interesting. How much GPU compute do they have on the subnet allowing them to run that inference? they have 4 ,400 H200s. H200s are the pretty powerful hopper series on GPUs. So that's quite a lot of compute. I'm pretty sure if you had to rent that, that would be millions of dollars per month. So, Shunt is millions of dollars per month just in the GPU compute to serve the deep sink models and all the AI models that we showed you on the previous screen.

54:05And they don't host those GPUs themselves. Other people are hosting them and just attaching to the Shoots API. Hey, you could use my GPU if you want. Correct. And they get rewarded for that in Shoots tokens. In Shoots alpha tokens. Correct. And now let's say I'm a user though of Shoots. So Shoots is going to help me. Using all of these deep seeks and all these GPUs, Shoots could help me make an AI model, like an AI front end to my, like a customer service chatbot, for instance. So how do I actually use shoots? I'm going through their flow now. Their front door, you were describing like front doors are really important.

54:46Their front door is actually really nice. And again, this is like a developer product. So you want to be a developer or someone a little bit more technical to really use this. But let's just say we go in there, we select a model, right? And then we want to run this and we want to do it in private. and we'll do it with one GPU. So that's auto-selected. And I need a developer account. So I've got to create a developer account. See, this is where things get a little technical. They're charging you some money to create a developer account. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, and so I wish they could price this in fiat dollars.

55:22I agree. And okay, it'll get converted into Tau. No problem. They can use Tau, but it's friction for me to now calculate how much I'm actually spending. Totally agree with you. The BitTensor subnets should not be directly charging the users in the Alpha token or in Tau. They need to make it super dead simple. Charge the person, get Apple Pay. I double click my Apple Pay, I can buy the thing or I can use it. I can check out with my American Express card, I can check out with my Visa card or my MasterCard. I can spend a big transfer if it's like$200 ,000 or something, but I'm usually just going to use my credit card or my debit card.

55:59Yeah, like now I have to think like, oh, I got to get out my wallet with my Tao in it. Like that's, nobody's going to do that. Very few people own Tao versus the number of people who own dollars. Yeah, there's only maybe 200 ,000 people in the world that own Tao, which is a very tiny, very tiny number. So that shoots. A lot of work to do. A lot of work to do. But then if I want to actually, so once I sign up, I then upload my data or my FAQ for my customer service. And I'm not a user of shoots, so I don't think I would be the right person to explain. Some of our engineering team would be a better spokesperson for this subnet because we actually do use 64 on TauApp.

56:47For example, we go back to TauApp and we go to the Bont. We have an AI built into TauApp. can say, what is the historical price trend of subnet 89 over the past month? And Savant is calling DeepSeek hosted on subnet 64 by a miner of subnet 64 to actually generate this answer. Why didn't you just call DeepSeek directly? I mean, I don't even know if that's possible. Is there a home for DeepSeek where there's an API? No, it's a software like Linux or MySQL. You've got to run it yourself in order to actually get the value from it, right? So you can run it on a server somewhere that someone else controls.

57:40You can get it through a SaaS API. You can run it on your own EC2 instance or on your own hardware or your Raspberry Pi. But you've got to run DeepSeq. You've got to run DeepSeq. So in this case, you didn't have to run it. You have a connection with shoots and you set up your own shoot. Correct. We are going through Open Router. And Open Router has ATIs for all the top models. And if you go check out DeepSeek V3, DeepSeek V3 has a significant provider called shoots. and they're serving tens of billions of tokens per day. There's also Targon. And Targon is hosting almost 10 billion tokens of R1 and V3 per day.

58:35These are really gigantic numbers. If we go look at DeepSeek and then the top providers, this is the DeepSeek website on OpenRider. DeepSeek R1 052 free, free hosting, The number two providers are BitTensor subnet 64, which is Shutes. And the second provider is Targon, which is BitTensor subnet 4. And so are there a lot of people then, like tau.app, your website, are there a lot of people then who are already using Shutes and getting served these 10 billion tokens a day? I would wager hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of people. Yes. And it's interesting because it wouldn't be like, oh, I've got to use Shoots to make my customer service chatbot or whatever.

59:22I think there's not enough kind of obviously you have to know about Tau and BitTensor and then Shoots to even begin to use this as opposed to it just being like, oh, yeah, I should use Shoots. Shoots should almost conceptually stand on its own as a company. Totally agree. Totally agree. Which means there's a lot of potential. A lot of potential. You could have that company be worth tens of billions of dollars. Or you could have a company that uses the shoe's intelligence be worth hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars. What do you mean? Because Meta vertically integrates. Meta is worth$2 trillion.

1:00:11$2 trillion. dollars. Meta owns WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook feed, AI, ARVR, and a bunch of other investments that are smaller. You add all that up, they are transforming all of these products to be AI native and AI first. The number one cost item for Meta is computational expansion. and AI talent. Those two line items. Scaling AI, right? Oh, we just bought a company called Scale AI as well. Yeah, for$15 billion. It was a dividend because they didn't want to get blocked by antitrust. And so it was an inside deal to mitigate FTC shenanigans. And so Duck's principal bottleneck is compute and AI talent.

1:01:18No single company on the planet has a monopoly on AI talent in the same way that no single company on the planet has a monopoly on intelligence or on the ingenuity of people or on the creativity of people. No one has a monopoly on that. People claim that that's the case in America, in the West. I disagree. All of the top AI papers are written about Chinese people in China. Okay? So you're delusional if you think the United States has a monopoly on talent. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. The open source community has proven this since time immemorial, since the beginning of open source pre-software in the 80s and 90s.

1:02:05Open source has proven that the only monopoly on talent is this fairly mid-sized king rock in space called Earth. That thing has a monopoly on talent. Not a country or a company. And so BitTensor is designed for this. It says, you have a permissionless reward to create the most useful and valuable commodities for your fellow humans and maybe for future species of intelligence. And I think that that will attract more talent and more compute than any private company could in their wildest dreams, in their wildest dreams. Okay, so once again, I'll just push back a little. So Shoots right now is whatever, worth$10 million,$9 million, something like that.

1:02:55I forget what you said. But their potential competition, like if they were not on BitTensor, they could be worth maybe half a billion dollars with the kind of numbers they're putting up. The market cap is incredibly, the incredibly, like I said,$88 million market cap. Would they get frustrated with that? I think shoots is just getting started. It's very young. And I think if you looked at Bitcoin's progress for the first decade, it was dismissed and regarded as a scam by almost everyone until it wasn't. And now all the largest asset managers in the world are saying they need to own some Bitcoin.

1:03:36Larry Fink from BlackRock or Blackstone. I can never remember. BlackRock. He's saying, yeah, everyone buy Bitcoin. You know, it should be a staple in the portfolio. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a million dollars. Larry is saying this all the time.

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1:06:12you know what the tipping point was for the internet? Like, if you think back, what was the year that everyone finally stopped saying the internet, the web is a fad, or, oh, I would never put my credit card into the internet, it would get stolen by hackers. The tipping point, I really think, was around 2004 and 2005. And what happened that year was that there was a billion users worldwide. That was the first time we tipped over a billion users worldwide. And so, you know, in Bitcoin, Bitcoin right now, we're almost at that point. Like a lot of people still say it's a fad, but then you have six cabinet members on Bitcoin and Larry Fink and so on.

1:06:51I think we're at like 300, 400 million users worldwide. It's not quite at that billion person point yet. Now it'll be interesting because BitTensor, if you say not just only the people who hold Tau, but the people who actually use and don't even realize that they're using shoots on some website, they don't even realize it. Like on Tao.app, I didn't realize I was using shoots by typing into that prop box. So it's probably like many millions, but not yet close to the billion point. But the point is, it's always going to get bigger from this point. It's hit escape velocity. But to your point, we're still so far from mainstream saturation of populations on every continent, right?

1:07:35Like 300 million. I was just reflecting on the most successful technology exit position of all time, which is YouTube. And Google acquired YouTube for$1.65 billion in stock in 2006, October 2006. I know this because both founders of YouTube are investors of mine, which I'm very grateful for. And they're really talented people. And then when they sold, they had 20 million users or something. YouTube has 2.7 billion active users now and produces 40 billion, 40 billion in annual revenue for Alphabet. 40 billion. Okay, very profitable. By the way, the biggest and most valuable training data set for AI in the entire planet is the video data on YouTube.

1:08:33The most valuable bar none. That is the most valuable training data. Elon would need to fail his compute by 50 times to be able to train on the corpus of training data on YouTube. So it is a gigantic. And so stock appreciation adjusted. Google would have paid$25 billion to buy YouTube today. That's still a steal. That's a steal. Yeah, because if you think about it, what was the limiting factor that YouTube had that forced them to sell to Google back in whenever it was? They didn't have, they had to host all these servers to host all their videos. They couldn't afford to do it. And so this is the decentralized moment where you don't have to host anything now.

1:09:23They also were forced to sell because they were getting stewed into oblivion by IP protection lawsuits and all the lawyers because people would upload music and songs and videos and stuff. They were violating... They'll get hundreds of takedown notices every month or something. And when Google basically convinced them to sell, like, look, we have a lot of lawyers at Google. Yeah, Google's the number one lobbyist in Washington, D.C. So they said to Chad and Steve, you know, relax, we can take care of it. And we will scale YouTube to, you know, the promised land, which they did. They did very, very successful.

1:10:10But 2.7 billion active users is 10 times more than the number of people who hold Bitcoin. Roughly. 10 times more. Active users, though, that's like every month actively you watch a couple YouTube videos. Like, wow, wow. 2.7 billion. That is a lot. We are very early with Bitcoin. Very early. And with BitTensor, we are where Bitcoin was in 2012, 2013. Yeah, because if you think about it, with Bitcoin back then, it was hard to build an application that used Bitcoin. I tried to make a Bitcoin-only store in 2013. And I was selling one product, and I was selling a book I wrote. And I couldn't figure it out.

1:11:02And I'm a developer, and I called Coinbase. They couldn't help me. I called Coinbase's VCs. I called Fred Wilson. He's like, boy, they should really be able to explain this. But I finally found a developer who could help me, and I did it. and sold 60 copies of my book for one-tenth of a Bitcoin at that time. And I would email them a PDF. So it's like they spent$10 ,000 for a PDF of my book in today's dollars. But yeah, I sort of feel like BitTensor's kind of hit that. It's sort of hit the point where this is a real thing. It's not just a fad. and I would say it's got many more use cases right now than Bitcoin had in 2013.

1:11:49So it's hit this sort of escape velocity, but still people just don't know about it because even when you go to shoots just now, which is the most popular subnet, aka company on BitTensor, it's hard to use. It's hard to figure out. I needed my Tau wallet address and pointed here and that's where I think these subnets are going to take the next step because like you said, there's 128 companies on BitTensor and they're incredibly useful. Shutes is delivering 10 billion tokens a day but still needs to evangelize a bit more. 150 billion tokens a day, actually. 150 billion. That's a lot. Yeah. It's like over four and a half trillion tokens.

1:12:41Or no, what is that? Yeah. Four trillion a month, five trillion a month. Google was doing 10 trillion a month one year ago. Sundar just announced they're doing 500 trillion a month now. They grew 50x, right? Is that 50x? Yeah, I think that's 50x. Yeah. That's impressive. But Google overall, a year ago, was doing roughly two times more than Shute will do this month. Wow, that's impressive. And Shute did not exist six months ago. And so it's growing like this. It's growing hyperbolic. So here's a question that a lot of people ask, which is, okay, let's say Shute is super successful and it's worth billions.

1:13:25How does that translate into an increase in the price of Tao? people who want to use the commodity of the subnet they have to transact and denominate the use and the purchase of the access to that through Tau because all of the alpha tokens on the subnets are denominated in Tau so people shouldn't know that or they shouldn't have to even think about that you should just be I got some Ethereum I got some Bitcoin I got some USDT some USDC or I've got cash, fiat. I want to be able to use front net. I don't want to worry about the Tau alpha conversion thing. I just want to use it. That will happen.

1:14:08But basically provide liquidity to any of the subnets. You stake Tau and there's a finite amount of Tau in circulation. So I think what people will realize, this is going to be pretty trippy, but what people will realize is they're going to be like financialization to a degree and to an extent of maybe perversion and manipulation and just extreme speculation that we have not seen in the history of digital assets for sure, by the way, including Bitcoin. And then things will probably start to see some and discover some price equilibrium. But Tau, I think, will be more valuable than Bitcoin. I think it'll be worth a lot more than Bitcoin.

1:14:57I think Tau will be worth 5 to 10 times Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will succeed. I really believe Bitcoin is super important for its use case. But the target for Bitcoin is place gold, replace the dollar. We're talking$100 trillion,$120 trillion. So maybe 50x from here. maybe 50x from here. BitTensor from here is a millionx. I don't know. I can't see. What's the differential on the value of a stored value medium of exchange currency for humanity versus what's the price and the value of a network that continuously produces more and more valuable, useful digital commodities across every possible domain.

1:15:54It's a pretty big gap. It's interesting. It's an important thing you said. Bitcoin is valuable for its use case. And I think what it's coming down to is that its use case is as a store of value. Let's replace gold as a store of value just in case the dollar collapses. And we see this in countries like Argentina or Iran. When their currencies start to collapse, Bitcoin spikes up. And so, yes, it has this use case of protecting people against bad currencies, which potentially the dollar could get to who knows. But BitTensor, I would and this is going to sound almost too extreme, but I'm going to stand by it.

1:16:32BitTensor is a pure is a pure form of capitalism. BitTensor replaces not replaces, but is the capitalism model. Basically, you have capitalism. Any company is people. There's three groups. There's people who have a commodity. There's people who need that commodity, like Uber. People have empty seats in their car. And then there are people who want to ride on those empty seats. And then BitTensor in the middle, any company in the middle, provides an incentive mechanism so one side meets the other side and all problems are handled and transactions are done and communications happen. So it doesn't even, you know, I didn't even use the word currency.

1:17:18It's just capitalism is about incentives to connect two groups of people who need each other. And that's what every company in the world is. And BitTensor emulates that on software in this very pure way. It is the most expressive language of value in the history of languages of value, which principally the most popular one is capitalism. And well, I mean, we were on a barter trading system before capitalism. And so there's just this evolution. BitTensor is transforming and upgrading capitalism in the same way that Bitcoin is upgrading and transforming capital. Because capital is one of these ingredients of capitalism.

1:18:03You need the currency. You need the ability to express the number system, right? Whereas capitalism itself is this extremely complex and dynamic language, where if you get the language design right, you have what's called equity value. And equity value is worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, maybe a quadrillion dollars. capital worth a couple hundred trillion, maybe 150 trillion. I'll give you the exact numbers. So there's$150 trillion worth of fiat currency on the planet. So potentially if Bitcoin, which is worth 2 trillion, starts to really make inroads into replacing fiat currency, which it hasn't yet, it could go, like you said, it could go up 10X, 20X, 50X.

1:18:59but there's two numbers that are important in terms of BitTensor. First off, there's$1.4 quadrillion worth of financial assets. So stocks, bonds, royalty streams, real estate, there's$1.4 quadrillion worth of financial assets. But now if you can really think of how to, what does it mean that we're gonna create some new AI company? So there's invisible financial assets that haven't yet been created that could be five quadrillion dollars more. And we're saying, you know, like for instance, using BitTensor's incentive mechanism, you can create Uber. The miners could be the drivers, okay? The validators are like, or the subnet is like Uber.

1:19:43It's gonna say these drivers are good, these drivers are bad. And then you have users who are gonna pay some form of capital into this to get rides with the drivers. So you could, it's not even about AI. you could recreate Uber on BitTensor. I don't see why not. A decentralized, you can make it even a peer-to-peer Uber. Yes, absolutely. Every centralized network, like that example, like a marketplace or social app or ride sharing, any of these networks, any of these centralized networks could be transformed into decentralized networks through the power of BitTensor subnet incentives. and furthermore, I mean, like you've got to think of every industry is being transformed by technology and by software.

1:20:31But the language of the business models of those industries is this thing called capitalism and shares and stock compensation and equity and equity markets and venture capital, private equity and public equity and derivatives and all the shit. very messy, very error-prone, very slow, just horribly inefficient. Horribly. I speak of them entering my eighth year as a venture capitalist, having invested a bunch of money, have a lot of Starbucks and stuff. It is such a mess. Oh my God. Very bad. And by the way, financial inclusion, there's maybe 100 people in the world in venture capital that are doing the investing that really benefit from the returns on the investing side.

1:21:27On the limited partner side, it's more, but on the people that actually do the investing and stuff. Why? That is crazy. So Bitensor can upgrade so many things about the totality of industry, not just like money management, but every possible industrial category getting transformed by technology. Marc Andreessen famously says, software is eating the world. All these technologies are getting transformed to become software-based. Now, AI is eating software. All those software's been retrained and re-implemented as a neural network. Guess what's going to happen with neural networks? They're going to be transformed from centralized neural networks and Elon's data center in Tennessee and Google's data centers around the world and company controlled.

1:22:22By the way, Google's controlled by just two guys. I mean, they're They're good people, but it's too fast. God's care. Meta is controlled by Wanda. He knows. So Elon controls XAI. He also controls Tesla. He also controls SpaceX. Do you know SpaceX has an asset, which is the fastest growing business in history? Pretty sure his$300 subscription that he announced this morning is going to grow pretty fast too. But let's just focus on Starlink. Starlink went from zero to 50 million subscribers in two years. Each subscriber pays like hundreds to thousands of dollars, right? The business went from zero to tens of billions in revenue faster than OpenAI went from zero to ten.

1:23:12Way faster. And this is Elon taking his Starship rocket and shooting gigantic racks full of satellites It's shooting more of them in orbit. By the way, telling the whole world as he's doing it. He's like, we're really proud. We're launching more. Starlink can totally replace the entire internet on the planet. And Elon controls the entire thing. I mean, I'm using Starlink right now. Elon controls the entire thing. Elon controls the entire thing. One guy. This is very important for people to understand. By the way, I'm an Elon fan. I like Elon. I think he's very duplicitous and messy and crazy in a lot of ways, which I think he's aware.

1:23:59I think he's a self-aware guy. I think he's very self-aware. I'm a big fan of his. I do not want all of humanity controlled by one fucking guy. Absolutely not. Yeah, and to your point, let's say I have the 30 million anonymized private patient records, and I want to create an AI model so that when there's a new patient, I could run it through my AI model based on the 20 million patient records. And, oh, this person has a sore knee and a headache, maybe has brain cancer. The AI model spits out. So I want to be able, to your point, I want to be able to own that, to keep the data and own the entire model and the software.

1:24:39And so not being reliant on open AI or 50 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs or whatever it would take to train my model is important to me. And also being able to access all the resources that BitTensor could provide to create my AI model to serve my patients, this is important to me. It would be too expensive using the, I don't even know how I would do it, honestly, using OpenAI. I know how to do it using BitTensor. I would use some combination of the subnets, shoots, gradients, Targon, one of the computes, Selium for the compute, I think they do it. So, you know, I could figure it out. And I don't even need to have that much technical expertise.

1:25:25I believe that Tensor can help Elon and OpenAI and Microsoft and a lot of the biggest technology companies in the world struggling, trying really hard, spending tons of money to acquire more compute and to acquire more talent. The whole talent war between Meta and OpenAI right now is kind of laughable. and why are you overpaying people? You're overpaying people. Like, ridiculously. Ridiculously so. You don't need to do that. We can all benefit from them together as humanity and we can get to the promised land much faster, more efficiently. And those power-hungry, like, magnets of power, which are kind of, you know, in front of us, We know who they are.

1:26:17It's Tesla and Elon. It's Google. It's Microsoft. It's Meta. Apple, maybe a couple of other companies. Less than 10 companies. Humanity deserves a solution for centralized power monopolies. We deserve a solution. BitTensor is the solution. And so, okay, on this point, let's tease like, we want to do more episodes of this what we want to say is like the format like you know each episode you know I could say maybe we'll introduce more subnets and more capabilities maybe we'll introduce more ways you could start your own AI company using the resources BitTensor and by the way it's not because we want you to use BitTensor it's because this is the only way I know of you can easily build an AI company as cheaply as possible like how else would you build an AI company as cheaply as possible you can't hire an AI programmer right now because Facebook's paying them$100 million or whatever.

1:27:17So you just can't do it. You can't do it. You're correct. Nope. It's not possible. So I would have to use BitTensor to create an AI company. Or if I'm an AI entrepreneur living in Ohio or whatever and not one of the cool kids in Silicon Valley, like you probably are. For the record, I am one of the super cool kids. The best majority of people are not me. and you are absolutely right, James, when you say the normal people cannot compete. That is impossible. Do not even try. But through the power of BitTensor, actually, I think you may be able to compete, which is pretty crazy. That's actually pretty close.

1:28:00Yeah. I mean, you already see it. Again, each subnet's a company and they're quietly serving up billions of answers a month. So anyway, so that's, Is there anything else I can add to the format? What else do you think? I am very excited to have these conversations. And I think we will have no shortage of extremely exciting things to talk about. Both in terms of the world events, AI, and how Bitensor is related to those events in deep and meaningful ways. Excellent.

1:29:02The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and Julie and Julia Bon Appetit! All for free on your favorite devices. Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.