Bittensor – Beating Google at its own Game
Building a decentralised market for intelligence
Bittensor is one of those projects, that has everything an investor wants to see. A highly skilled team, a “simple” yet ingenious idea, a fair launch, token utility and no big marketing yet started.
Today AI is inefficient, non-transparent and incredibly expensive
To understand the potential of Bittensor, let's jump 5-10 years into the future: Bittensor will have the most effective and largest neural network in the world. It will be decentralised, various AI companies will validate the quality of machine learning models inside the network and get rewarded with TAO tokens (native token of Bittensor).
Big companies like IBM, Google or Microsoft, but also smaller ones, will pay TAO to use the various models inside the Bittensor network for their own projects.
But why would Google use Bittensor, if they already have their own machine learning networks?
Because the centralized AI industry is highly ineffective: Google alone spends 75% of their electrical cost only for machine learning today. The usage of a machine learning model like GPT3 costs $12 Million US-Dollar per hour!
AI research compounds itself every year, new models have basically always first to relearn, what previous models already learnt. They will not be able to not at least use the than most effective and largest neural network in the world as an addition.
Scalable and globally-distributed
Those are all problems, that Bittensor wants to solve. The open-source protocol powers a scalable, globally-distributed, decentralised neural network.
Several thousands machine learning models work together on different tasks, while helping and learning from each other. A consensus mechanism allows the network to reach consensus on which models are producing information that are valuable and get rewarded with TAO accordingly. Whoever wants to buy reviewed and proven artificial intelligence will be able to do so on Bittensor, if they hold enough TAO.
The founders and brains behind Bittensor have both worked on the “dark side” of the industry. Jacob Steeves has worked on enterprise machine learning at Google and Ala Shaabana at IBM. They built a team of currently around 10 AI developers to build Bittensor, but are already planning to expand the team this year.
Tokenomics and Token Utility
The value of TAO is connected to the value of the intelligence that it is produced by the network. Ownership of the network comes with holding TAO. So, if someone holds a fair amount of TAO, he gets to decide, on what the network will be trained on.
If an external company wants to use Bittensor, for example to develop a specific software, it needs TAO tokens. In order to have the request bandwith to make the application worthwhile a certain amount of TAO is needed.
Also the miners and validators of the network are incentivized with TAO.
The Tokenomics are inspired by Bitcoin: The max supply of TAO is 21 Million tokens and every four years there is a halving event (the first one in 2025). The current issued supply is around 2,7 Million TAO (Mcap of TAO is around 50 Million).
Polkadot Ecosystem in Q4
Currently you can buy TAO only on an external exchange (run by a third party) by swapping with bitcoin or on the discord of Bittensor via OTC by swapping with USDC. I would recommend the latter, as the prices are cheaper over there and you can use a middleman.
By the end of the year Bittensor will be integrated into the polkadot ecosystem and TAO will be listed on various DEXs, so that you can swap TAO also with other cryptocurrencies.
Where Bittensor stands today
In a podcast in May the founders said that the projects was “still in the people are laughing at us”-phase. Meaning that the bigger companies in the AI industry are still critical and first want to observe what the newcomer can do.
Bittensor is currently focusing on building the network, training its models and getting to a state, where they can prove their competition what they are capable off. So as Investors this is a good time to get in slowly.
Investment thesis
I will definitely add some TAO to my portfolio. Probably I will DCA into it and try to buy dips. The price has risen extremely in the past weeks and many early investors have started to sell large quantities (you could buy 1 TAO for $5-10 weeks ago).
I will hold the tokens until the first institutions will start to use the network in the upcoming years and will be happily sell them my tokens.
By the way, the first institutions are already on board. Foundry, a subsidiary of DCG, is already mining TAO.
Notable Partnerships: Polychain Capital, Digital Currency Group and Firstmark Capital invested in Bittensor.
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ETH: 0x9F070515BdE3A93eA2851B5c610C9Bcab29A944c
BNB: 0x0dFa76E5918b6590e8DaA27A58D72d4F3bA1f483
DAO
Bittensor is working out plans to create a DAO on the polkadot chain for next year.
The main goal of the DAO is to create subnetworks and set of executives that run those networks. People that hold TAO will than have the possibility to buy into the DAO and determine how the system will move.
The DAO will also control over what problems Bittensor will solve.
Update 17.09.2022 - OTC-Trades Channel deleted
Since the OTC-Trading Channel of Bittensor blew up in size and in preparation to the upcoming dex release the team deleted the otc-trades channel today. With this step the team wants to assure not to risk to violate securities laws.
But a dedicated Bittensor OTC Discord was created by the Mods, where you can trade TAO via OTC again:
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Useful links:
How to buy TAO:
High level presentation by @AIZorr0 on Bittensor:
Various interviews with the founders:
Bittensor Network: https://bittensor.com/network
Bittensor Discord: https://discord.com/invite/3rUr6EcvbB
Bittensor Website: https://bittensor.com