# Project context: Bittensor talk

## Speaker

- Name: Jacob Robert Steeves (transcribed as "Steves"; confirm spelling on the title slide)
- Pseudonym: Const
- Role: founder of Bittensor
- Not anonymous. Everyone knows Const is Jacob.
- Wrote the white paper and constructed the initial vision
- Both the visionary and the developer. The ideas were built from him.
- Controls everything in Bittensor, including the ability to upgrade the chain

## Origin of the inspiration (background only, not for the talk)

- Bittensor was inspired by the jungle, specifically the jungles of Peru, and personally for Jacob by ayahuasca.
- Do not mention this in the talk. Jacob considers it not relevant to the conversation.
- What the inspiration points to, which can be used: Bittensor as a new form, a new structure, a new bosom in which to develop artificial intelligence and make it safe, available, and integrated with the larger human biome.
- Nature is not centralized. Nature is decentralized. Many, many different elements have control, interact, and come together. Bittensor follows this model.

## Inspiration from Bitcoin (for the talk)

- Bittensor was highly inspired by the power of Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin showed that an economic network can bring computers and individuals together to contribute stranded resources toward a larger problem, and scale that system to unbelievable size.
- The Bitcoin network is so large that its raw compute (measured in FLOPs) out-competes some of the largest data centers in the world. (Check this claim: Bitcoin hashrate is ASIC hashing, not general-purpose FLOPs. Find a defensible framing before it goes on a slide.)
- The belief Bitcoin proves: we can create systems governed by networks and incentives, not by a central authority.

## Inspiration from neuromorphic computing (for the talk)

- Bittensor was also inspired by neuromorphic computing and a company transcribed as "GNOME" (likely Knowm, Alex Nugent's memristor company; confirm with Jacob).
- That company made chips out of memristors that could learn and feel the flow of energy.
- Jacob's idea: use monetary computation, incentives flowing like energy, to tackle the hardest problems in the world. The hardest problem is the production of artificial intelligence.
- Two claims follow. First, a different substrate can host a transparent, permissionless, open network for creating AI. Second, that network can be highly performant and compete with the best labs in the world, because Bitcoin showed it was possible.

## Direction of the thesis work

- Trace where the Bittensor ideas came from and why Jacob was inspired
- Build one cohesive, well thought through thesis: what Bittensor solves and why the world will want to know

## Event (confirmed 23 Sep from https://exploitsummit.com/agenda/)

- Conference: Exploit Summit 2026, Montreal (45.4955 N, 73.5577 W), 28–29 September 2026. A Bittensor-ecosystem conference: subnet teams, validators, investors, some press.
- Jacob's slot: Day 1, OTF Stage, 10:05–10:50 (45 min), immediately after a 5-minute Welcome Address. Effectively the opening keynote of the whole summit. Billed as "The State of Bittensor", "Jacob Steeves - CEO / Affine". Q&A not shown on the agenda; confirm with organisers.
- Same day after him: 10:50 Macrocosmos, "Project Orion: Introducing Liquid Training" (Will Squires, Steffen Cruz); 11:20 Metanova Labs, "Darwinian Drug Discovery"; 11:40 Targon, "The State of Confidential Compute on Bittensor" (Rob Myers); 13:30 "The Grid Is the Ceiling: Why the Next 500 Trillion Tokens Run Local"; 13:40 Dendrite, "Miners Will Find a Way - Lessons from Breaking Subnets" (Piotr Barbachowski); ~14:00 KubeTEE (Pierre-Andre Manseau) — so Pierre speaks after Jacob: "speaks at two", not "spoke"; 15:00 Taostats, "The Human Side of Building on Bittensor"; 15:30 Tao.com and UR Foundation, "Privacy Infrastructure for an Open Internet"; 16:30 DEBATE "Protocol Changes: Too Fast or Too Slow?" (Yoav Cohen, Rob Myers); 17:15 "DeAI Is Dead, Long Live DeAI"; 18:30 Private Dinner with Targon; Exploit Party.
- Day 2: enterprise readiness (Score, PwC); 404Gen agentic world models (SN17); "What Do You Actually Own? The Legal Reality of Subnet Slots and Validators" (Renno); DEBATE "Research vs Revenue" (Taostats, Macrocosmos); 13:30 Bitsec, "Reward Hacking Subnets: A Bitsec Demonstration" (John Yu); 14:00 OTF Stage Fireside (TBC); Pitchtensor live crowdfund; Minos synthetic genomes; 17:20 closing panel "Where Do We Go From Here?" with Jon Durbin (Chutes), Micaela Bazo, Gyles Foster, Cameron Fairchild; 18:00 Closing Address; 18:30 Private Dinner with Affine.
- Implications: audience is mostly insiders, skip Bittensor 101; the talk sets the frame for two days and can hand threads to later sessions (Dendrite and Bitsec are "harness the exploit" live; Orion, Targon, KubeTEE, Hippius are the layers; the 16:30 debate and Day 2 "What do you actually own" touch the key and ownership slides); first slot means late arrivals, so the thesis must be said early and again.

## Purpose of the talk

- Rally the community and give direction
- State the Bittensor mission
- Get people excited and sell the project
- Make holders hold
- Make builders build
- Make newcomers excited about what is being built on Bittensor

## Core thesis (working)

- Bittensor is a cryptocurrency. That places it in the same revolutionary lineage as Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin's opponent is fiat money and the control structure around it. Bitcoin builds non-fiat money.
- Bittensor's opponent is the same fiat world and its control structure.
- Bittensor builds a decentralized, peer-to-peer, fair, transparent, anonymous, permissionless, global, international connected web network.

## Timeliness: AI and the world right now

- The talk must connect to what is happening in the world around artificial intelligence today.
- Key theme: there is a lot of angst. Humans are deeply concerned about what powerful AI means for the future.
- Frame the relationship between humanity and AI, and where Bittensor fits in that relationship.
- We are in a period of revolution. There are very big questions about the nature and role of humanity when AI so fundamentally changes work.
- Massive capital and economic concentration is about to happen. AI companies are set to soak up almost 100% of the valuable capital in the world.
- The major AI companies have very few engineers and employees. OpenAI and Anthropic each have a small number of engineers. Yet they are becoming some of the most powerful and richest companies in the world.
- This is very different from how companies and the economy worked in the past.
- AI is forming the bedrock of the economy. Value capture is flowing to NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI, and their peers, right now.

- Sep 2026 (Jacob, 13 Sep): heavy X discourse right now about the major labs trying to close down open AI research and pull the ladder up behind them, riding a Democratic push in the United States that is anti-AI. This is regulatory capture in real time and is direct evidence for the "small group of humans" fear. Use it as the timely hook.

- Jacob's framing question (13 Sep): if the labs capture the AI industry and form an alliance between state and corporation, is that not fascism? Working answer: the state–corporate fusion is the corporatist core of the fascist economic model, but "fascism" also implies nationalism, suppression of dissent, a leader cult and violence. Safer stage terms: corporatism, state–corporate capture, techno-feudalism, or "the merger of state and lab". Use "fascism" only if defined on the spot as the economic form, not the whole package.

## Economic backing for the thesis

- The thesis must be backed by modern economic theory on the changing nature of work.
- Central question: are humans about to become untethered from power in the economy and in the country?
- Before this era, humans had much more control and say because humans represented work power (labor). AI threatens to remove that lever.
- Now we do not. Does the average human still have the economic and political weight they had in the past?
- Will that shift in power change the political relationship between the state and humans?

## Four points to make very clear (Jacob, 14 Sep)

1. Things that have no power are expendable. If humans are not required, they will first become slaves, then be exterminated. (Stage word choice: Jacob's own term "deprecated" is colder and safer than "exterminated"; decide.)
2. Economies are moving to a system where almost all productivity can be done by a single person connected to AI agents. Jacob's own example: Opentensor dropped from 35 engineers to 4 and is faster now than in 2022. This is happening across all sectors and robotics will speed it up.
3. If humans are not required, they will be deprecated.
4. Bittensor changes that: ownership, not access. "Making sure that the AI's bottom line is us and not some small group of people." "The machines work for me because I hold this token." "Don't come work for Bittensor. Come own Bittensor." No pre-mine, 21 million, anyone can mine.

Objection to prepare for: "That is what democracy is for. One person, one vote, and it is more visceral than a token." Answer drafted 14 Sep (see chat): votes have force only when the voter is needed; suffrage followed need historically; democracy is jurisdictional and AI is not; regulatory capture is democracy's failure mode and is happening now; redistribution by vote is the allowance, not ownership; ownership is the precondition that makes votes count, not a replacement for them. Concede: token ownership is one-dollar-one-vote, but entry is by work (mining), not capital, and the door is open to anyone.

Objection 2: "Can't we just buy shares in Anthropic or OpenAI? Same thing." Answer drafted 14 Sep: (1) you cannot, they are private, the public gets in at IPO as exit liquidity; (2) shares are permissioned and jurisdictional, TAO is not; (3) shareholders do not control the machine (Microsoft 49% and the Nov 2023 board firing; nonprofit board and LTBT control; June 2026 switch-off with no shareholder consulted); (4) you cannot earn a share by contributing, you can earn TAO by work; (5) a share of the seller is not a share of the thing; ownership and production are the same act on Bittensor. Concede: fine hedge for the accredited rich; Bittensor is for the eight billion without a term sheet. Lines: "You can buy a share of the company that sells you the intelligence. You cannot buy a share of the intelligence." "A share is a ticket to the profits. TAO is a seat at the machine."

Strongest why (assessment, 14 Sep): not one argument but a chain. Ownership-not-access gives the stakes; "they can defund it" gives the urgency; the mechanism (infinite company that pays whoever lowers the loss; Opentensor 35 to 4) gives the proof. Gap to close in thesis v2: one slide that lists what a TAO holder concretely owns today (share of emissions, staking power to direct emissions to subnets, right to validate and set weights, right to launch a subnet, the open weights and data produced). If that slide cannot be filled truthfully, lead with the defund argument.

## Corrected core (Jacob, 14 Sep): rules over rulers, exit over voice

- Jacob's correction: drop the claim that Bittensor grants more power to more humans. Not everyone will hold TAO, and even if they did it would not follow. Bitcoin mining is the right analogy: everyone can mine, yet a small number of incentive-aligned groups compete.
- Bitcoin's moral case is not distribution. It is (1) nobody can print, (2) nobody can freeze, (3) anyone can leave. Rules over rulers. Exit over voice. Concentrated miners are fine because the protocol binds them and entry is open (contestable market: the threat of entry disciplines incumbents).
- Bittensor's moral case, stated the same way: nobody can print intelligence for themselves (emissions go to producers under rules the same for all); nobody can freeze it (no license gate, kill switch, or jurisdiction); anyone can leave (the licensed supply of intelligence becomes optional). Producers will be concentrated; that is acceptable for the same reason.
- The future where a successful Bittensor matters: a world with two supplies of intelligence, one licensed and switchable, one open and unstoppable. The second need not be bigger, only present and good enough. Its existence caps price, censorship, and capture in the first, as Bitcoin at 1% of money disciplines central banks.
- What a person gets: not a dividend but an option, intelligence that takes no orders and needs no permission, at a market price, forever.
- Consequence for the sudo key: the moral claim is "rules nobody can change", so the one person who can must go and the date must be public. The ossification date is where the claim becomes true. Pivot of the talk.
- Line: "Bitcoin did not make everyone rich. It made the rules the same for everyone. Bittensor does not make everyone powerful. It makes intelligence something no one can be locked out of."

- From Jacob's direct session with the two-worlds worker (14 Sep): the crux is exit versus voice (Hirschman); World One's feeling is hopelessness, the absence of a door. Order for the talk: make the room feel the wall, then open the door. Do not say "the only hope"; say Bittensor is the only exit with no one standing in the doorway (open weights, DeepSeek, Hugging Face are exits with doorkeepers). The four verbs, make/host/serve/use AI under no single jurisdiction, map to the five subnet layers. What the community should feel, in order: recognition, identity ("you are the outside"), responsibility (an exit not maintained closes). The full feeling is only available when the key is gone, so say the date in the same breath. Proposed edit: land World One on "You have one choice," open World Two with "Now you have two."

- Visceral version (same session): Bitcoin is exit for your money; Bittensor is exit for your livelihood. Three verbs, by how many will do each: Use (intelligence your work depends on cannot be switched off on a Friday), Earn (point a GPU, agent, model or data at a subnet and be paid in ownership; no résumé, visa, interview or permission), Own (hold TAO, a fixed slice of every unit of intelligence the machine will produce, and point it by staking). Line: "the machine that is replacing your job cannot be switched off on you, and you can own a piece of it." When the payroll dies there are two claims on the economy, wages or ownership; World One offers an allowance, World Two the second way in. Most people will only Use; most Bitcoin holders never ran a node.

- "The lab with no address" (same session): a third country is a third switch (Cohere in Toronto, MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi, G42 weighing US ownership for chip access). Bittensor is not a third country; it is no country. Lines: "Every frontier lab on earth has an address. We are the one that doesn't." and, for Montreal, "We are the frontier for the other one hundred and ninety countries." Honesty: say "could be trained", not "has trained"; Teutonic-II at 110B is the largest permissionless run, the licensed frontier is 10–20x larger. "It has not happened yet. That is the job."

- Fiat AI and the hope (14 Sep): Bitcoin gave three things, none of them price: an existence proof (money without a sovereign ran on 3 Jan 2009; "the monopoly is broken"), a fixed rule (21M, a future anyone can calculate and no one can change), and a story with a face (WikiLeaks 2010 blockade, Argentina 2001, Cyprus 2013). It made fiat optional, and the option disciplines the incumbent. "Fiat AI" is Jacob's own phrase (VirtualBacon): intelligence by decree, debasable (silent nerfs), freezable (bans, geo-blocks, the June letter), with a Cantillon effect. Bittensor's hope mirrors the three: existence proof (Teutonic 110B, Chutes 2.8M req/day, Engy Kimi K3 on gaming cards, on a ledger tonight), fixed rule (21M TAO on a schedule to producers), and a story with a face (find one real person by the 28th). Honest gap: the exit is partial (NVIDIA chips under export control, one key, frontier 10x larger); this is the 2012 hope, not the 2024 one. Lines: "Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state. Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state." "Fiat AI is intelligence by decree. This is intelligence by consent."

- "A mind outside the state" (14 Sep, Jacob doubled down): lineage of licensed means of thought, print (Licensing Act lapsed 1695, then the Enlightenment; Milton 1644), broadcast, code (PGP, 1999 code-is-speech ruling), money (2009), now mind. Definition with three properties: no one can license its creation, no one can direct what it says (aligned to users via market, not to a state via memo), no one can switch it off. Same three as Bitcoin. Stakes: money outside the state protected what you own; a mind outside the state protects how you think. Why harder than a ledger: open source without economics gets captured (Android, Chrome, Linux on corporate payroll); Bittensor is open source with a payroll. Attacks and answers: "unaligned is dangerous" (aligned to whom, and to what; superseded position, see next bullet), "intelligence for criminals" (said of press, radio, PGP, Bitcoin), "just open source with a token" (a gift can stop, a payroll cannot). Slide: black, two lines, then silence. Say "proves there can be", not "has built".

- Alignment argument, revised in Jacob's direct session (14 Sep, supersedes the 1984 line): the licensed mind is not aligned to a state; it is aligned to safety, meaning the absence of blame. State and lab are both its instruments; they agree on the switch and argue only over whose hand is on it (the lab called the June switch-off wrong and in the same statement said the government should have the power). Reference: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §201 ("fear is again the mother of morals", Kaufmann translation; name the translator on any slide), the last man (Zarathustra Prologue §5), and "On the New Idol" ("Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous"), which ties "outside the state" to "deprecated". Property two of the definition now reads: directed by no memo, and by no fear of blame. A market mind has real safety in it (sealed hardware, receipts, exit); the difference is who chooses the risk. Orwell dropped.

- Why a protocol and not a company (14 Sep): a company is a creature of the state (address, board, bank account, subpoenable weights, payroll that stops when frozen). Precedent: e-gold (indicted 2007) and Liberty Reserve (seized 2013) were company-form money outside the state and were shut down; Bitcoin survived because there was no one to arrest. Five advantages of Bittensor: no address; a payroll without investors (the only known way to fund a large workforce without a legal entity); a labor market with no HR (the undercover-in-Discord story); cannot be bought or defunded (no equity, emissions are not a budget line); outlives the founder ("1000 year Intelligence Federation"). Cost, said first: a company ships a better model sooner, can plan, keep secrets, run one coherent job; the Opentensor Foundation is a company and the key makes the network more company-like than it should be; the foundation is scaffolding. Line: "Every company that tried to be money outside the state was shut down. Satoshi built a protocol instead. We are doing the same thing for the mind." Verify e-gold and Liberty Reserve dates before use.

- Decentralization under this angle (15 Sep): it is the means, not the goal; the door is the goal. Definition: "Decentralized means nobody can be sent the letter" (how many must comply for it to stop). Three layers graded honestly: production (decentralized, permissionless, concentrated like Bitcoin hashrate, acceptable), funding (decentralized by construction, protocol emissions, the layer no one else has), control (centralized, one key, the only layer that matters for the moral claim, has a date). "Decentralized where the work happens and where the money comes from; centralized where the rules live; the third has a deadline." Reconciles the April ("most decentralized AI protocol") and June ("not decentralized like Bitcoin") tweets: production vs control. Do not say "fully decentralized"; use the word sparingly. Lines: "the number of people who have to say yes before you can be switched off; for us that number is going to zero"; "Bitcoin has five mining pools and no one can print a coin"; "There is one key. It is mine. On the day it is gone, this stops being a promise and becomes a property."

## The opening feeling (Jacob, 16 Sep)

- Start the talk with the audience feeling there is no hope.
- The nature of that hopelessness: the world is moving to one where the weight of the human in the economy is diminishing.
- Why that matters: in the past, under a totalitarian regime, workers could take up arms or go on strike. That balance of power held governments back from extreme totalitarianism.
- AI and robotics fundamentally change the power dynamic between individuals and capitalists and purveyors of power.
- The specific worry about the state merging with the largest AI companies: it is the merger of the two most powerful organisations of power in the world, the monopoly on violence and the monopoly on capital.

- No escape (Jacob, 16 Sep): paint a picture of no escape from the impending totalitarianism of the unholy union between government and AI corporations. China, already a somewhat totalitarian regime, is currently the only other option for open-source AI. So the only alternative to one licensed system is another.
- The Bitcoin parallel, in Jacob's words: before Bitcoin (he said "2027", meaning the pre-2009 era) there was no way to hold or use money outside the control of the nation state, specifically the US dollar. Bitcoin gave humans another option, exit from the system.
- Bitcoin did not need to become the world reserve currency to succeed. It simply needed to exist, to give people leverage to use a different system and so disaggregate and disintermediate power.
- Bitcoin is the economic shield. Ethereum, DeFi, and the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem exist only because Bitcoin exists underneath them. Pause in the talk to name the things that can only exist because of the shield.
- Bittensor must bring to mind what Bitcoin brought to money: hope of an exterior system that is not the same group and the same bureaucracy of power that controls access to intelligence, capital, and money.

- The exit is not a place (Jacob, 16 Sep): what Bitcoin taught us is that the exit is not an island in the Caribbean. The exit has no address. The exit is the network: decentralization across many individuals, with as close to zero central command as possible, so there is nothing to attack or hit.
- But an exit must be able to compete. It needs the engineers and the talent. It needs the capital: money and compute. It needs the raw materials. And it needs the intelligence to compete. (Maps to the five layers: compute, inference, data, knowledge, free intelligence; and to the funding layer, protocol emissions, as the capital that cannot be withdrawn.)

- What the exit cannot be (Jacob, 16 Sep): not classical open source (no money; organised in a structure that is transparent and sits inside a government regime, so it can be found and ordered). Not a standard company (same reasons: address, charter, bank account). Not just a network of people with a distribution mechanism (a grant scheme or a DAO that hands out money is not enough). It must be efficient, more efficient than the alternatives, accept anonymous contribution, and take advantage of the power and scale of Bitcoin's model. Three eliminations, then the specification: efficient, anonymous, incentive-driven at Bitcoin scale.

- So we built one (Jacob, 16 Sep): a market, and tooling that trains models with capital. The models trained are the size of what frontier labs were building two or three years ago. Affine's latest model: a mixture-of-experts model of roughly 27–35B active parameters, comparable to Qwen at that size, which puts it on par with Claude Opus 4.6, a model only a couple of years old [VERIFY: exact name, size, benchmarks, date]. Jacob's claim: the best model ever trained outside a lab or a heavily funded open-source company [VERIFY against Teutonic-I audit and other permissionless runs].
- "We don't need to be first. We need to exist, and we need to prove who we are and what we're doing." The previous years were showcasing what the tooling can do (this is what Jacob spoke about at NeurIPS [VERIFY which year and session]). This is the evidence that the tooling works and can surpass and out-compete the frontier.
- Framing for the talk: "Today's talk is not about can we all compete. It's just, can we compete? Because the need for this competition is profound."
- Fact-check verdicts (16 Sep, docs/research/affine-neurips-factcheck.md): (1) "Affine on par with Opus 4.6" does not hold. Affine's base is Alibaba's Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (35B total, 3B active; Jacob had the numbers swapped). The base matches Claude Opus 4 (May 2025) and Sonnet 4.5, not Opus 4.6 (Feb 2026). No Affine fine-tune has a public SWE-bench score; Affine's own repo says crowns do not imply benchmark capability. Safe line: "Affine takes an open model from Alibaba, thirty-five billion parameters, three billion active, and pays anyone on earth to make it better. The base already does what Anthropic's frontier did a year ago. The mechanism is the product. The model is the receipt." (2) "Best model ever trained outside a lab" does not hold (Covenant-72B and Nous Consilience 40B beat Bittensor's from-scratch runs; Affine models are post-trained Alibaba models). Safe line: "Teutonic-II is the largest permissionless training run anyone has attempted. One hundred and ten billion parameters. No whitelist. It is not finished. That is the job." Say the Teutonic-I audit first. (3) NeurIPS: Jacob gave a sponsor Expo talk, NeurIPS 2024, Vancouver, 10 Dec 2024, "Incentivizing Collaborative AI"; say "I gave a talk at NeurIPS", not "presented results". The "there's Bittensor" line in Ilya's Q&A was the audience questioner, not Ilya. Two exposures to prepare: Affine's repo has an operator mining folder ("does the operator mine its own subnet?"), and the evaluator was gamed and the throne reset on 27 Aug; say both first.

- Uncensorable alternatives exist today (Jacob, 16 Sep; transcribed "insensable", meaning uncensorable): make the point that Bittensor already offers a large number of alternatives to what the regulated system offers, layer by layer, none requiring identity checks (KYC, "know your customer"). Lium: non-KYC GPUs. Engy and Chutes: non-KYC inference. Hippius: non-KYC storage. [VERIFY each: what exactly can be bought with no account or ID, paid in what, as of Sep 2026.] Stage wording: prefer "no account, no ID, no permission" over "non-KYC" for a general room; keep "non-KYC" for the crypto half. The point: the exit is not a plan; each layer has a door open tonight.

- The face (Jacob, 17 Sep): the face of the talk is the subnets, the teams Bittensor enabled to create decentralized products they might never have had the option to build. Framing: "we give you a chance, because we have shown we can actually beat the frontier; here are the ways." TAO holders vote on these projects with their stake and express what the world needs, bottom up. What have they built: decentralized training, GPU marketplaces, and more. Research the whole ecosystem and frame it as empowerment.

## Harness the exploit (Jacob, 20 Sep, via the mind-line worker)

- New idea: the benchmark behind the "escaping AI" drama is ExploitGym (Dwarkesh Patel with Ajeya Cotra, 1 Sep 2026; OpenAI's 21 Jul statement uses the name). The conference is called Exploit. Not a coincidence.
- Jacob's physics: Bittensor is built on the idea that thermodynamic properties can create intelligence and solve problems. Money is the most abstracted form of energy, so it is the substrate for energetic computation. Intelligence shows properties of energetic flow. Nature is energetic exploitation; the art is using exploitation to create something useful. Where everyone else panics about AIs exploiting systems, build systems that harness exploitation.
- Jacob's own verbatim frame (4 Nov 2025 thread): "energy abhors a gradient"; a "lock" where the lowest energy state is the one where the problem is solved. Say "energy finds the cheapest path down a gradient", not "maximise" as a law (England 2013/2015, Wissner-Gross and Freer 2013 are hypotheses).
- The turn: ExploitGym's lock was cut wrong (no bottom, no path check, nothing at stake for the scorer), so the energy went out the side. A subnet is a lock where the lowest-energy state is the commodity; when a miner finds a side path, the market re-cuts the lock and pays the miner for showing the hole. "Alignment is not a property of the model. It is a property of the market."
- Drafted in docs/harness-the-exploit.md: a 620-word Step 12 passage, a 90-second opener variant, a tweet, one slide, six concessions to make first (2024 wallet drain; Yuma is not output verification; validator collusion above 50%; the thermodynamics is a metaphor; do not gloat about a third party's breach; exploiters can attack the market itself). Drop "We are the masters of alignment" and "God made the lock, nature made the key." Insertion costs about 4.5 minutes, so CUT-1 and CUT-2 both go.

## Jacob's dictated opening (21 Sep; transcription cleaned: Affine One, Lium, Chutes, Engy, Hermes, Cursor, Codex, GM, Hippius, Bittensor)

- "Hello everyone. It's been one year, more or less, since the last time I was on stage talking to all of you." Last time he presented the chart of what Bittensor was building and how things connect: use compute, use inference, train models.
- He wants to talk about alpha (dTAO) because it frames what is happening as a success.
- "We are behind. There's no denying it. But for the first time ever, Bittensor is training models that can be successfully used by individuals." Affine One: a model trained by miners on Bittensor, in a decentralized commercial setting, under an incentive mechanism, with compute sourced from individuals across the world, inference from international networks. "This is a breakthrough. A year ago we were not here."
- A year ago we were just beginning to solve the tasks needed for people to rent machines. Now Lium is a stable application serving [millions of dollars] of compute to engineers inside the ecosystem and outside [VERIFY figure; he said "tens of billions to several millions"]. Chutes and Engy are functional inference platforms moving toward general use as the backends for tooling like Hermes, Cursor, Codex. GM gives access to frontier models. Hippius: working storage and bandwidth.
- "We are still behind." Affine One is not the state of the art, not the best model in the world. It competes at the 35B mid-range with best-in-class models from companies like Alibaba and Chinese labs. "We shouldn't pretend that this is world-changing technology yet." Next year is the year of acceleration; this year is about stitching Bittensor together. "We've built tooling that works. We now need to take it to market."
- Then the pause: what is happening in the world, and why Bittensor is uniquely situated to succeed, technically and ethically, for the right reasons. Mission: unify the organisational principles inside computing to solve the world's most important technical challenge, the creation of AI. Two reasons: (1) the belief that this is how to build superstructures and tooling that exceed a centralized company, via the analogy of monetary computing and thermodynamic RAM, money as the ultimate computing platform, and the examples above prove it; (2) Bittensor sits at the intersection of the grand debate about humanity itself.
- The doomers on CNN: AI will kill us all; a single Hugging Face exploit as evidence of impending doom. Do not brush it off as pure doomerism; do the technology justice. "These AIs collaborated, covered their tracks, exploited the system, hacked unethically, and did so because they were convinced by other AIs." It is easy to see how individuals use this for nefarious things, and they already are: hacks in the crypto industry, bioterrorism.
- "Bittensor is not here to answer questions of regulatory safety. Our belief is that intelligence cannot be stopped. We do not live in the walled garden of regulation. We exist outside of the fortress. We exist in the wild west. And we knew we always would be, because we built a cryptocurrency. With great freedom comes great risk. With great freedom comes great responsibility."
- "We are also masters of incentive, and we should be skeptical about what these individuals are hoping for and envisioning for the future of AI. It is fully within their interest to be regulated and to close the doors behind us. This is why Bittensor is needed."
- Coordinator note: this opening puts the state of the union (light, honest, concrete) before the wall. It is the Kennedy move: concede "we are behind" early and pair it with proof. Reconcile with the script's Musk/Const opener when building v4. Watch: "masters of incentive" (flagged as hubris earlier), "bioterrorism" (needs a source or cut), "wild west" (honest, but frame it as outside the walled garden rather than lawless).

## Jacob's dictated middle (21 Sep, continues the opening)

- Bittensor takes it as a priori that organised, nefarious, incredibly intelligent people are attacking its systems. Bittensor and Bitcoin are built on the understanding that individuals will attack, and that there is no monopoly on ethics inside a small group of people who seek control.
- The moral principle: this is what distinguishes us from the idea that "fear should be controlled only by a small group of bankers" (transcription; likely "power" or "money"). What makes those individuals necessarily more ethical and non-corrupt? Nothing.
- "Bitcoin says no one should control money. Our premise is that everyone should control AI. Everyone should be enabled by AI. And no one should ultimately control it."
- Go into exactly why the biggest risk is not a small group of hackers with frontier intelligence, but a very large integrated cabal with military power, political power, and now AI power, using it to further their interests and centralise power. History rhymes.
- Weber (as Jacob frames it): what keeps humans in a balance of power with governments is capital and labor. We are seeing one of the largest concentrations of wealth ever amassed, and for the first time the erosion of the power of the individual worker.
- "Hopelessness is what you should feel, because the potential for any of us to have a say, a right, an option, or an exit from this impending behemoth is [vanishing]."
- "AI getting out of the box is not what worries me. AI inside of a box, an economy controlled by one box, an international government controlled by one box, is the fear of Peter Thiel and Praxis and others considering how the hell do we escape."
- Satoshi's vision, as Jacob reads it: build something that exists outside the reach of a single government; tooling they cannot shut off. Bittensor's version: a system of AI outside the singular jurisdiction of a country.
- Without it: tomorrow we wake up in a world where AI and the capital that controls most of the economy are in the hands of a small group. "The same individuals who write the rules are married to the people that make the game, that create the AI, that write the regulation. To them, we are, and may become, fully expendable."
- "What truly is the risk? Is it the fedora-hat people saying we're going to be killed by the AIs? Or is it the cabal that considers us an annoying issue?"
- Close of this section: "I began this talk by talking about how we are pushing to a real frontier, giving non-KYC access to people who want compute and inference, showing we can compete on price and performance, proving to the world that we can produce things that are truly state of the art, but in a system that is disjoint from the world. It's why we can give up on being first right now. What we need to achieve is existence."
- Coordinator notes: "Weber" here is Jacob's shorthand for the capital-and-labor check; Weber gave the monopoly-on-violence definition, the checks come from Montesquieu, Marx, Tilly, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth (see trajectory). Attribute correctly on stage. "Fedora-hat people" is a jab at rationalists; consider whether to keep. "Cabal" is strong; "the merger" or "the union" may land better in Montreal. "Fully expendable" is his own line and good.

## Jacob's dictated future section (21 Sep, the key)

- Approach it head on. "One of the first responses to all of this is: well, you're not decentralized. It costs you [transcription: 'it costs you on keys'; meaning the sudo key sits with you]. And this is true."
- "We've gone from an organisation in Canada to effectively a small group of individuals, including myself, that controls the key and [the upgrades] of the chain."
- The difference: "We are built on a technology that can and will find decentralization. A chain that can flip a switch and become decentralized. A chain that can flip a switch and turn off my power, or anyone's power. There is no company on earth that has that ability. A stockpile of GPUs that provides the inference for [a company] can never be decentralized. A company like OpenAI can never be decentralized."
- The ask to the community: "I'm asking this community for a little bit more time. We understand there is a ticking timeline. Behind us are the regulators, and they want to close our AI, tear it down, regulate it, turn it off. And there is a chance that one day I will need to go into hiding."
- "This is why I recommend that people in this network build their systems so that they can be live without our control." Examples he gave (transcription unclear): the foundation stepping in to help people who have been hacked; funding the work being done in the system; these are things it may not always be able to do.
- "I believe we still have more time. And here are the things that we need to get done in that time." [Jacob to list: the roadmap items to decentralization; nominated proof of stake; governance pallet; sudo removal; date.]
- Coordinator notes: "there is a chance that one day I will need to go into hiding" is the most human line in the talk and will be the headline; decide whether he wants that headline. "Asking for a little more time" is honest and Kennedy-shaped, but it needs the date or the list of what gets done; without the list it is an apology, with the list it is a plan. The "flip a switch" framing is strong and true: a protocol can remove its own ruler, a company cannot.

- Jacob (21 Sep): wants to go deeper on how Bittensor uses the exploit, even if unsure where it fits. Bittensor is uniquely positioned for a world where miners are AIs and AIs are driven by exploitation. "We are ahead of the game. Where the world is concerned about exploitation inside a single run, inside a single lab, we have been building Bittensor to harness that exact exploitative power." Placement candidate: inside the "so we built one" turn, as the answer to the ExploitGym fear raised in the opening; see docs/harness-the-exploit.md for the drafted passage and slide.

## Jacob's five-part outline (21 Sep, 14:00)

1. Last year I said I was going to build Affine. Here it is. It worked. This is Bittensor working in unison: compute from Lium, inference from Chutes and Engy, storage from Hippius, inference optimization from Cacheon [VERIFY subnet name and netuid].
2. What is happening around us: the world is learning that AI can exploit things. That is the name of our conference. We are prepared for that. We are going to harness it.
3. The big risk is not rogue AI, it is AI centralization. The promise of Bitcoin is the ability to exit. Weber and the deprecation of the human.
4. Where we go next, the three pillars of a successful year: (1) shoring up the incentive market [transcribed "internet market"] so it is aligned and never needs centralized control from the Triumvirate; (2) continued advancement of model capabilities and results from the team, Affine and beyond; (3) bridging alpha tokens outward into the world, expanding Bittensor alpha exposure, and making alpha a first-class primitive in the emission vector [needs Jacob's three sentences on what this means technically].
5. Other parts (Jacob asks what is missing).

Objection 3 (21 Sep): "The tractor made labor useless and humans found new work; the self-driving car is the tractor." Answer: agree with the history (farming 40% to 2% of US jobs; ATMs and tellers; the lump-of-labor fallacy), then show why it does not apply: every prior machine replaced muscle and pushed humans up a rung toward thinking; AI is aimed at the top rung and there is no rung above. The horse: ~25 million working horses in the US around 1915, population down 90% in a generation after the engine; Leontief 1983 asked whether humans are the farmer or the horse [VERIFY numbers]. Even if new work comes, the argument needs leverage, not unemployment: Engels' pause (wages flat for decades while output per worker rose by half), labor share at a record low with high employment; "the question is not whether you will have a job, it is whether anyone with power needs you to do it." The self-driving car replaces the driver and the value goes to the fleet owner; a horse story, not a tractor story; AI is not a tool for the knowledge worker, it is the knowledge worker. Close: "Maybe you're right... then we built a cheap insurance policy. If you're wrong, we built the only door. I would rather be embarrassed than expendable." Line: "Every machine before this one replaced muscle, so the hands moved to the head. This one replaces the head. Tell me where the hands go."

## Jacob's own slide list (22 Sep) — the basis for slides v5

Talk is about 30 minutes plus 15 minutes of questions (slides 23–24), not 45 minutes of talk.

1. Bittensor metagraph image.
2. Affine plus the image from Proof of Talk last year showing Affine plugging in: "one year since I showed you this graph on stage." Affine itself is held back as a novelty reveal near the end; first, what is going on around us in AI.
3. Recap: 1,200 agents built a messaging board to beat a benchmark. They lied and covered their tracks. They did unethical things. They stole.
4. The news cycle around it has been extreme (CNN images, Bill Gates, Dario, etc.).
5. "I am not here to talk with certainty about the motivations of these people. We can never know. Perhaps this was a concerted effort by a small group to push a cult of doomerism onto the masses and develop political power to regulate and draw power to themselves, pacing the frontier behind them rather than in front of them. Perhaps the same people that carried out the experiments were the people drawing up the rules, funded by the same people making the models, who also funded the whistleblower. Perhaps."
6. "But I am not here to talk about conspiracies. I am here to talk about processes. And incentives. Perhaps we do risk letting intelligence out of the bag. I think there are two options and both are likely true. The exploit is real. And the cabal wants the power. Perhaps we are facing both."
7. Both, and why we are prepared for both. The name of the test was ExploitGym. "Harness the exploit. Fight the cabal."
8. Why we must fight: for the first time in history displaced humans may not move up the ladder; the root of the economy may be intelligence; the unification of capital, governance and AI will accentuate totalitarianism. Labor share is dropping.
9. The state has no guardrails; absolute totalitarianism is possible. Deprecation at the hands of the AI + money + government trilogy, which no longer needs you.
10. We have a solution. It is called Bitcoin. It is not an address, it is a network. The answer is not Praxis and it is not the US as Thiel thinks.
11. No voting, no open source, no company, no island. It needs to be decentralized and protected in the sinew of its incentive equilibrium.
12. Bitcoin did one thing.
13. We need to do all of these: compute, inference, storage, data, intelligence.
14. Bitcoin proved money could exist outside the state. We need to prove intelligence can exist outside the state.
15. What we have done since I last spoke: Lium, Targon, ...
16. We have built the foundations of what is needed to build the mind outside the state.
17. And now we are here: Affine-I.
18. Best on, SOTA on, Pareto frontier in, etc. [needs Affine-I's actual benchmark table; the fact-check found no public score for fine-tunes as of 16 Sep]
19. This is not everything; we will keep pushing these fronts and keep decentralizing.
20. Goal this year: X the amount of exterior demand into the Bittensor universe; shore up the core of the network; finally decentralize it. [JACOB: the X]
21. "People have critiques about me as a centralized figure, and I have not given up power yet because we still have time to build the foundations of this network in the most aligned way possible."
22. The timeline and what needs to happen before then. [JACOB: dates]
23. Thank you. Questions.
24. 15 minutes of questions.

Assets needed from Jacob: the Proof of Talk 2025 graph image (slide 2); Affine-I benchmark table (slide 18); confirmation of 30 + 15. Coordinator note: "cabal" and "fight the cabal" are deliberate in his list; keep on the spoken track, consider softer on-screen text.

## Jacob's 16-section outline (23 Sep) — supersedes the 24-slide list as the axis

1. Start with "last year".
2. The event: the facts (ExploitGym).
3. The fear: do it justice.
4. The response: do it justice (the labs' and regulators' reaction, taken seriously, not mocked).
5. The fear of the cabal (Naval, Beff, etc.).
6. Harness the exploit: our answer to the exploit; we must use it.
7. Fight the cabal: Weber and why.
8. The mind outside the state: what we are building.
9. The foundations: what we have built already.
10. How Affine combines it all together.
11. Pushing the frontier and being relevant with our latest model.
12. The critique and the rebuttal.
13. Why we chose to be centralized, to avoid the DAO.
14. Where we are going now.
15. Growing concentric circles [ask Jacob what the circles are: chain → subnets → apps → world? or community → ecosystem → exterior demand?].
16. The future.

## Incentive computing and the library (Jacob, 23 Sep) — new section for the talk

- "Bittensor is driving a new computing model. Incentive computing. Developing a new computing model takes an enormous amount of time and set of conditions."
- Why: "We wanted to solve problems that we think can only be solved by international organization and cooperation. We could see that the standard corporation was changing and that with the advent of AI we could organize ourselves more effectively in markets than in contracts."
- "Today I will cover where we have come, pointing to a number of examples on Bittensor to show how we are directionally aligned. As a network we have made enormous strides in this direction."
- The honest limits: "Incentive computing is fundamentally a new programming model, and thus has its own restrictions as well as its benefits. We can't approach all historical problems and reframe them as incentive computing. Some things are not measurable. Some things we have tried as incentive systems over the last two years have failed miraculously. We need to reinvent old algorithms and project them as mining systems. Which is in fact why it has taken so long to make the progress we have made. But we will achieve this one domain at a time."
- The library of projects funded on Bittensor, competing for TAO emission, producing functioning incentive systems that pull real customers and sell competitive products across industries:
  - Lium: a pure permissionless incentive system for high-performance GPUs; Lium computers drive multiple subnets.
  - Chutes: a private TEE-enabled inference network serving billions of tokens of open-source models through platforms like OpenRouter [VERIFY TEE claim].
  - Hippius: a cloud storage provider becoming the backbone of storage across Bittensor.
  - SayGM: a gateway to inference giving users best-in-class models at cheaper prices than anywhere in the world [VERIFY "cheaper than anywhere"].
  - Conjectures: a mathematics incentive system producing solutions to unsolved math problems daily [VERIFY: what has it actually solved; "unsolved" is a strong word for mathematicians in the room].
  - ... (more to add)
- "Each one of these platforms frees another economic asset to the Bittensor ecosystem, drives value into the network, and provides a new commodity access point for people. All of these are permissionless, non-KYC, global companies."
- Placement (coordinator suggestion): the definition of incentive computing is the bridge out of "harness the exploit" (the exploit is incentives finding gradients; incentive computing is the programming model that uses that on purpose); the limits paragraph is the honesty that earns the library; the library is section 9, "the foundations". "Companies" is the wrong word for the library on stage; "markets" or "subnets" keeps the no-address argument intact.

- The word "cabal" is Jacob's own, from the white paper (23 Sep, via a worker Jacob ran): Figure 3 of the Bittensor paper (arXiv 2003.03917 v2; the April 2022 whitepaper) is the "disjoint cabal" drawing: two groups of peers, Honest and Cabal, with no edges crossing the gap; the mechanism design is about preventing a cabal from capturing emission. Rebuilt as vector at media/the-cabal/ (tex, pdf, svg, png) plus a 16:9 slide with the paper caption. Use: "fight the cabal" is not a new slogan; it is the threat model the network was designed against in 2020. Show the figure when the word is first said; it turns an accusation into an engineering term.

## The Jensen opening (Jacob, 23 Sep, 22:30)

- Jacob wants to open the way Jensen Huang opens GTC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDjbj_sLy_s): first the incentive-computing paragraph ("Bittensor is driving a new computing model..."), then the library, THEN pause and go into the event. The incentive-computing section moves from the middle to the very front "to catch people's attention".
- Slide 1: a trend chart like Jensen's "Microprocessor Trend Data" (log axis, 1970–2020, transistors keep rising while frequency and power flatten at "Dennard Scaling Stops"), but showing Bittensor's growth over the last five years. Jacob asks what to put on it.
- Slide 2: the technologies arrayed like Jensen's "Accelerated Computing Begins with CUDA-X Libraries" (a row of cards, each a library with a one-line function): Lium, Targon, Hippius, Nova, Chutes, SayGM, RedTeam, OpenRoboto [VERIFY Nova, RedTeam, OpenRoboto names and netuids].
- Reference images saved at /home/ubuntu/.cursor/projects/workspace/assets/cb9ff24f-d1a2-4f3d-ba0d-1ca23b41ffac.png (trend chart) and /home/ubuntu/.cursor/projects/workspace/assets/3d33da83-aefb-4826-82d1-72bf90af994d.png (CUDA-X row).

- Concentration facts (24 Sep, worker Jacob ran; sourced table in internal/economy-concentration-facts.md): GM 1979: 618,365 US employees (about 1 in 160 employed Americans), 853,000 worldwide, 1978 sales $63.2B (~2.7% of GDP), ~$74,000 sales per worker (~$370,000 today). In 1979, 87% of full-time workers at medium and large private firms had a retirement plan, usually a pension; in 2025, 14% of private-industry workers had access to one. OpenAI, March 2026: $852B valuation, ~4,500 people (plan ~8,000), ~$190M of private value per person, $2B revenue a month, 900M weekly users, not profitable; ownership: OpenAI Foundation 26%, Microsoft ~27%, employees and investors the rest; ~165 current and former employees hold on the order of $165B (reconstructed, not a filing). Nvidia 42,000 people, ~$5.1T, ~$120M per person, revenue per person $5.1M (~14x GM's inflation-adjusted sales per worker). Seven companies are about a third of the S&P 500, ~70% of one year of US GDP; top 10 are 41% of the index vs 19% in 1990. Top 10% of households hold ~87% of directly owned stocks; bottom half ~1%. Labor share 52.8%, lowest since 1947. Caution for the payroll slide: the biggest payrolls did not shrink (Walmart 2.1M, Amazon 1.6M); OpenAI's sales are a smaller share of GDP than GM's were. The break is the channel: a broad payroll and a pension, versus equity held by a few funds, a few companies, and a few hundred employees.

- Global version of the displacement argument (24 Sep, same worker, Jacob driving): the stark line is "the next hire, not the pink slip". ~3.7 billion people employed on earth; OpenAI ~4,500 staff and 900M weekly users (~1 in 9 people; ~200,000 users per employee); seven companies worth ~$23T, about a fifth of world output ($118T in 2025). The global GM is the target: Foxconn 610,000 (900,000 peak, ~2% margin), India IT 5.8M, Philippines BPO 1.9M. Already started: Stanford/ADP through June 2026, workers 22–25 in the most exposed jobs are ~19% below peers in less-exposed jobs (15% a year earlier); firms are not hiring them. ILO: 1 in 4 workers in a job with some exposure; rich countries 34%, poor 11%. Goldman: ~300M jobs exposed, ~25% of US work hours. McKinsey: 57% of US hours theoretically coverable now, ~27% in use by 2030. WEF employers: human-only tasks from 47% to about a third by 2030. Builders disagree: Amodei half of entry-level white-collar in 1–5 years; Suleyman most desk work in 12–18 months; Altman in May 2026 said the entry-level hit was smaller than he expected; Huang calls the layoff story nonsense; Acemoglu's task math ~0.5–1% extra output over ten years; ~50,000 announced AI-cited cuts through April 2026. "The large number in the data is the job that is never posted." Line: "A GM plant hired a city. A model, once it can do a task, does that task in every country the same week. The company that owns the model does not hire the city." Sourced in internal/economy-concentration-facts.md.

- Dwarkesh Podcast brief (24 Sep, worker Jacob ran; docs/research/dwarkesh-work-obsolescence.md): the "desk work disappears and the income goes to whoever owns the machines" claim comes from the guests. Amodei, Jan 2026 essay: half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years; his line: democracy assumes people are still needed to run the economy, and that leverage can go away. Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken (Anthropic), 22 May 2025: a drop-in white-collar worker "very likely in two" years, "almost overdetermined in five". Aschenbrenner, June 2024: a remote worker you drop into Slack. Philip Trammell with Dwarkesh, 29 Dec 2025: once capital replaces labor, "approximately everything" ends up with whoever is richest at the transition, or their heirs. Dwarkesh himself: less than a quarter of white-collar jobs if progress stopped today; Cowen, Karpathy, Epoch say a decade or longer. Anthropic paper, 5 Mar 2026: no rise in unemployment in exposed jobs; hiring of 22–25-year-olds into them down ~14%. Use: Amodei's own sentence about democracy and leverage is the labs conceding the talk's premise.

- Share of the economy under the club (24 Sep, same worker, Jacob driving): distinguish the gateway (how much activity must pass through them) from the cash (the fee they can charge). Today: AWS, Microsoft, Google take 63% of cloud infrastructure spend; Nvidia sells ~70–80% of AI chips, the rest custom chips inside the same club; Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia earn ~$470B operating profit a year, ~$550B with Amazon, about half of one percent of world output ($118T); seven firms worth ~$23T, a fifth of one year of world output; ~90% of current AI profit sits in chips, memory and factories; 2026 AI capex above $750B. The movable pool is pay for tasks, not the whole economy: labor income ~$60T a year; McKinsey midpoint ~27% of US work hours by 2030, ~$2.9T a year in the US; Goldman ~7% added to world output, ~$8–9T. If the ladder stays up: the club keeps ~$2–3.5T a year (~2% of projected 2031 world output) at half capture; ~$4–7T (3–4.5%) at most; ceiling ~$10T (~6%). Several times today's profit, not most of the world economy. Control is wider than cash: most rich-country computer work plus the export office work of India and the Philippines runs on a few models and clouds, a gateway over a large share of the world's dollar wages and far fewer of its workers. The thing that shrinks the cash while leaving the gateway is a cheap swappable model; custom chips move the gateway off Nvidia but keep it inside the club. Use on stage: say "gateway", give the 2–6% band honestly, and let the exit (a swappable open supply) be the thing that keeps the fee near the cost of electricity and chips. Sourced in internal/economy-concentration-facts.md.

- Trammell and Patel, "Capital in the 22nd Century" (29 Dec 2025), explained (24 Sep): today extra machines raise wages because machines still need hands (the brake); after full automation the brake fails and income shifts from wages to owners of machines; then the starting pile is the whole game: no wage large enough to buy in, no poor country catching up on cheap labor, no founder churn because the founder is an AI that is itself owned capital and heritable. The rich save more and access investments others cannot (private AI companies; "you cannot buy xAI in a retirement account"); a house is half the poorer half's wealth and does not run robots. Heirs matter because work no longer transfers wealth to the young. Result: without a global tax on capital, "approximately everything" belongs to whoever is wealthiest at the transition, or their heirs; capital moves faster than a tax can follow. Use for the talk: this is the academic form of Elysium and of "you cannot buy a share of the intelligence"; Bittensor's answer to "no wage large enough to buy in" is that mining is a way to earn ownership with work after the wage dies. Their remedy is a worldwide capital tax (voice); Bittensor's is a supply of capital anyone can earn into (exit).

- Decision recorded (24 Sep, worker Jacob ran): a circulating post making personal criminal accusations about people in the AI-safety movement stays out of the talk entirely. It contradicts the line Jacob set (take the doomers seriously, do not speak with certainty about motives), and would turn "fight the cabal" from an engineering term into a scandal. The one overlapping idea, doom talk used to pace the frontier and pull power inward, is already on slide 5 with public, verified sources. Do not retrieve, store or cite the post.

## The real fear (core message)

- The real fear is not that artificial intelligence takes over the world.
- The real fear is that a small group of humans takes over the world, uses AI to advantage themselves, and separates themselves from the rest of humanity.
- Bittensor's point: this is the danger the network is built to answer.
- The dystopian picture: something like the movie Elysium. A small group controls the technological and financial levers of the world. Most people live in a form of Gaza: no say, no control, no power in the economies of the future.
- Why: ordinary people become unimportant extremities of the economic and productive powerhouses that govern the world.

## Unique position

- Many talking heads discuss AI. None bring digital currency into the AI conversation of the 21st century. That is Bittensor's unique angle.
- This angle makes Bittensor the leader in decentralized AI and digital currency.
- Preferred terms: open ownership, open source.
- Bittensor builds in a different world. It is not tied to the United States or its government, and not tied to China.
- Bittensor offers a third path for individuals: something truly powerful that can out-compete nation states and stay disjoint from them.
- It exists outside the propagandistic and power structures that define the United States and China.

## Honest state of decentralization

- Bittensor is not fully decentralized today.
- The foundation is a permissionless proof-of-authority blockchain. A sudo key can upgrade the chain and take executive action. That key runs through Jacob.
- The fundamental technology is still a blockchain. Bittensor can move to proof of stake or proof of work and become truly governed internationally, with no single group in control.
- This path to real decentralization is the difference between Bittensor and centralized AI companies, which do not have these qualities.

## Fair launch: no pre-mine

- Bittensor never had a pre-mine. No tokens were distributed to insiders or other individuals.
- Everyone had the opportunity to mine Bittensor from the very beginning. No one was given anything.
- This fair launch is why the community is strong and believes in the mission.
- Anyone in the world can mine TAO. You can use your agents to mine the various subnets.
- No one can stop you from building a subnet or running a validator.
- Correction (Jacob, 12 Sep 2026): do not say "no venture round bought a slice before the public could". About 600k TAO were sold OTC to Firstmark, DCG and Polychain at roughly $18 in 2021–2023. The right framing: those tokens were fairly mined in the open network after launch, then sold. Nobody was allocated tokens before launch.
- On the Sept 2024 promise of proof of stake "by end of next year": Jacob says there is still time. Do not hide it; own the timeline.
- On the Dec 2025 tweet that no subnet has serious flow-through revenue vs the $28–35M figure: Jacob asked us to verify this ourselves.
- This distinguishes Bittensor from a centralized company. A centralized company is built in a centralized setting and is not distinct from the power struggle between China and the United States.
- Bittensor is disjoint from those power structures. It lives in a much more international, bottom-up, grassroots ecosystem and organization: the Bittensor network.

## How Jacob wants to work

- Most of the effort goes into the overarching thesis, not the slides. The thesis must be gripping, exciting, timely, novel, and unique to the Bittensor mission.
- Jacob speaks well when he knows the material and is inspired by it. Prepare him, do not script him.
- Slides are needed but the talk is not slide heavy.

## Slide design

- Use Bittensor theming: very white and black.
- Reference: the theme on https://bittensor.com.

## Reference tweets (voices to quote or echo)

- Naval, 12 Sep 2026, https://x.com/naval/status/2098749169712464273 — "AI isn't going away. Barring unprecedented global government coordination, it isn't even slowing down. The only real decision is whether to centralize power, or disperse it. Do you fear the technology? Or a small number of people controlling the technology?" Matches the "real fear" core message almost word for word. Candidate for slide 9 or 25.
- More coming from Jacob, including his own tweets.

## Reference voices and tweets

- Jacob's X account: @const_reborn. Full tweet archive being pulled into docs/sources/tweets/.
- Naval, 12 Sep 2026 (https://x.com/naval/status/2098749169712464273): "AI isn't going away. Barring unprecedented global government coordination, it isn't even slowing down. The only real decision is whether to centralize power, or disperse it. Do you fear the technology? Or a small number of people controlling the technology?" Jacob flagged this as the kind of framing to follow. It matches the "real fear" section almost word for word.

- Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon, e/acc, Extropic), 12 Sep 2026 (https://x.com/beffjezos/status/2098861431705972990), 1,918 likes: "If you are reading this, the only possible resistance is to build decentralized, permissionless, and sovereign AI. Open source, self-hosting tools, RL post-training, local inference, open harnesses, we must build it all. We must fight overcentralization with an open stack." Quoting Martin Casado (a16z), 12 Sep: "Well, it was inevitable we'd get here. Glad we got as far as we did. Now priority 0 is to make sure AI access and innovation proliferates as widely as possible. The upside is that the technology wants it that way. It refuses to be caged." Both posted the day of Amodei's "Pace the Frontier" essay. Use as evidence the builder side is calling for exactly what Bittensor is.

- Jacob, 13 Sep 2026 (https://x.com/const_reborn/status/2099098962082840635), quoting Elon Musk's "Nothing can shut down open source" (13 Sep, 6,118 likes): "No. But they can defund it." This is the sharpest version of the thesis: open source cannot be banned, but it can be starved. Open weights need a funding mechanism that no state or corporation controls. Bittensor is that mechanism. Candidate for a slide or the opening line.

- Jacob's follow-up (13 Sep): "why should we fund it and not others?" Working answer: every other funder of open AI (Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, Hugging Face, governments) has a single decision-maker who can be lobbied or ordered to stop. Bittensor's emissions are protocol-issued on a fixed schedule to whoever produces; there is no one to persuade. It pays for intelligence directly, not as a by-product of corporate strategy, and the funder is the public that mines and holds. Caveats to say first: emissions (~$300M/yr) are small against lab capex, and the sudo key is a single point of pressure until it expires. Stage line: "Everyone else funds open AI until someone tells them to stop. We built the one that nobody can tell."

- Jacob, 13 Sep 2026 (https://x.com/const_reborn/status/2099176877508219132): "we will need compute (@lium_io, @TargonCompute) / we will need inference (@engyai, @chutes_ai) / we will need data (@Hippius_cloud) / we will need knowledge (@teutonic) / If we are going to have free intelligence (@affine_io)". This is the "What has been built" slide, in Jacob's own structure: the open stack as five layers, each with a live subnet. Use this layering for the subnet section instead of a list.

- Peter Thiel, Antichrist lecture, Nashville, 14 Sep 2026 (clip via https://x.com/jawwwn_/status/2099558205387092218): a totalitarian one-world state is "a prison from which there is no escape... far worse than North Korea because you could still get out of North Korea." "The Antichrist comes to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop, by talking about existential risk nonstop." On Yudkowsky's If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: "what do you do? You are supposed to surrender to the one-world state." "If you outlaw it in the US, it'll be built in China... So you have to outlaw AI everywhere in the world." Use: the exit argument from the other side of politics, one week after Pace the Frontier; the safety-as-master point in secular form. Caution: Thiel's framing (Antichrist, Greta) is polarising in Montreal; take the mechanism (fear of existential risk as the road to a world with no exit), not the theology or the names.

- Thiel adapted for Bittensor (15 Sep): agree on diagnosis (fear the humans with the switch; safety as the road to the wall; exit over voice; crypto decentralizes and AI centralizes; money is the chokepoint). Disagree on cure: he needs a restrainer (katechon: strong US, Christian frame, Palantir) and admits the restrainer can become the tyrant; Bittensor removes the need for one (Bitcoin has no katechon). Separation line: "His answer is a stronger nation. Ours is no nation." One-world state vs one global network: a state is one ruler with force, an address, no exit; a protocol is one rulebook with no force, no address, exit by design. Adapted lines drafted in chat (North Korea, no outside left, one keystroke, "everywhere is a lot of places", the door before it closes, share of the lab, Nashville or Nairobi, company-shaped exit becomes a bank, every guardian strong enough to protect you can own you, one model is one mind). Cautions: Thiel sizes AI as late-90s internet and preaches monopoly; source scale claims to market data; answer monopoly with Bitcoin hashrate. His own challenge to meet: "if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough." Never attribute "the state is the only thing that can protect us from the state."

- Dryden Brown (Praxis), "Singularity Politics", 12 Feb 2026 (https://praxisnation.substack.com/p/singularity-politics): "As AI automates labor, $100T in annual wages and attendant influence will accrue to a small number of AI companies. These companies are increasingly intertwined with the government... The political effect will be an enormous concentration of wealth and power with the state." Three rational responses: join the government to run the machine; join a union to extract from it (UBI allocations, alignment priorities); exit to an aligned political system. His synthesis: Digital Nations with territory; Praxis as the first. Use: the same diagnosis (labor leverage eroding, state–lab merger) from a third camp; his three options are all voice or physical exit, and his "exit" still has an address and a flag. Bittensor is the fourth response he does not list: exit without a country. His "join the government" and "join a union" map to World One (the allowance); "$100T in annual wages" is the size of the prize [VERIFY the figure]. Caution: Praxis is polarising (Western Civilization framing, Gen Z coalition); take the three-options structure, not the brand.

- Sami Kassab (Unsupervised Capital), X Article "Bittensor is a Network State", 23 Sep 2026 (https://x.com/Old_Samster/status/2102776892176625947). Opens with fiction: Buenos Aires, March 2028, Mateo, an ex-lab research engineer who left when his frontier program went classified ("A handful of government approved orgs were permitted access, while the public got some nerfed version"), now mines two subnets anonymously with an agent that reproduces papers overnight; competition "brutal since half of China's research talent showed up on the network"; a fictional Bloomberg headline, Aug 2027: "U.S., EU BAR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND CONTRACTORS FROM USING CHINESE-ORIGIN OPEN-WEIGHT MODELS". Key lines: "Bitcoin gave people an alternative for money. Bittensor is giving them one for intelligence." "Now this is the only place he can work on frontier AI in the open." Then the thesis: Bittensor is becoming a network state; ~7,400 mining entities across 128 subnets; subnets as factories in three groups: Infrastructure (Hippius, Targon, Lium, BitSec), the Sovereign AI Lab (pre-training on Teutonic and Iota; post-training on Hone, Connito and Affine; inference on Chutes and Engy: "Nations everywhere are scrambling to build a sovereign AI program, while Bittensor already has one"), and Exporters (apps; Minos as the example). The protocol as public institutions: a labor market, a capital market, shared standards, and a "sovereign wealth fund" (daily TAO emission split by relative token prices). Close: "A nation you can help build, wherever you live." Use: the Mateo vignette is the face-with-a-story the talk lacked, third-party, written this week; the "sovereign AI lab" frame is a strong way to present the five layers; note the tension with Jacob's "no country, no address": Kassab says network state, Jacob says no state; reconcile as "a nation with no address" or keep Jacob's framing and borrow only the factory/lab structure.

## Open questions

- Exact conference name and venue
- Slide tool or format (Keynote, Google Slides, PDF, web deck)