The Weirdest Crypto Bet I’ve Ever Made
Here’s the dirty secret nobody likes to admit:
Open source built everything.
Linux.
The internet.
The web.
Google.
Apple’s OS.
Microsoft’s OS.
Every trillion-dollar software company is sitting on top of code written by people who mostly didn’t get paid.
That’s insane.
There was a Harvard study that estimated: Every $1 put into open source creates ~$2,000 in economic value.
Great ROI.
Except the person who contributed the $1 doesn’t get the $2,000.
The value evaporates into society.
Open source solved innovation. It never solved compensation.
That missing piece is why so many open-source projects burn out, get captured, or get strip-mined by corporations.
But there’s a solution…
Bittensor is the Antidote
Bittensor fixes that.
Not by closing anything. Not by gatekeeping. Not by centralizing.
By doing something more radical:
It turns incentives themselves into an open system.
Think about it this way:
Open source says: “Anyone can contribute.”
Bittensor says: “Anyone can contribute—and the system will continuously decide who contributed best and pay them.”
That’s it.
That’s the entire breakthrough.
Each “subnet”—which is like a business in the Bittensor ecosystem—is a competitive arena.
Miners bring intelligence. Validators judge it. The network rewards improvement.
No hiring committee. No VC permission. No résumé games. No billion-dollar GPU budgets required.
If you’re a kid in Oklahoma with a better idea, you can compete with Anthropic.
That sentence should scare a lot of people. And it does. That’s why they don’t like talking about it.
What About the TAO Token?
People get distracted by the token.
TAO isn’t a currency. Subnet tokens aren’t equity.
They’re instruments for incentive alignment.
Bitcoin stores the incentive to secure a ledger. Bittensor stores the incentive to improve anything.
Coding models. Drug discovery. Mental health. Compute. Energy optimization.
Whatever humans can define and measure.
Each subnet has a fixed supply.
No printing. No dilution. No “just one more round.”
Finite supply + infinite improvement = deflationary incentives.
That’s why this works.
You can always print more shares. You can always reprice options. You can always dilute.
Bittensor doesn’t let you do that.
If you screw up incentives, miners leave. If you get lazy, competitors appear. If you stop improving, the market moves on.
I don’t know how big Bittensor will get exactly.
I do know this: Every major technological leap happens when incentives finally match reality.
Open source unlocked creation. Bitcoin unlocked monetary truth. Bittensor unlocks coordination at scale.
That’s rare.
And rare things don’t try to convince you.
They just keep working… until suddenly the world looks different.
And everyone asks: “How did we miss this?”
But you won’t.
Not anymore.
