# Slides, draft v3: A mind outside the state Exploit Conference, Montreal, 28 September 2026. 45 minutes. Speaker: Jacob Steeves (Const). Drafted 17 September 2026, eleven days out. This is the rehearsal deck. ## Header **Thesis in one sentence.** For three hundred years the state was held in check because the money could leave and the hands could stop; AI removes both checks at once, so the only remaining check is an exit, and Bitcoin proved an exit is not a place but a network: Bittensor is that exit for the mind, running tonight, small, with one key left to remove and a public date for it. **The one metaphor, carried through: the switch.** Set at slide 9 (a letter at 5:21 pm and a model goes dark), pressed at slide 10 (the exam is the wall), named at slide 11 (every step is called safety and every step is a switch), answered at slide 13 (three rules; a supply with no switch), turned on the speaker at slide 22 (the key is a switch and it is in my hand), and closed at slide 24 (one supply of intelligence in the world with no switch on it). No second image for the danger. Elysium is said once, in notes, on slide 11, and never shown. **The spine.** v3 follows `docs/trajectory.md` step by step. Sixteen steps, twenty-four slides: | Step | What must be true | Slides | |---|---|---| | 1 | Weber: the state is the monopoly on violence | 4 | | 2 | Two checks held it: capital could leave, labor could stop (Montesquieu, Smith, the Black Death, Tilly 1975, Forged Through Fire, in one breath) | 5 | | 3 | AI removes the labor check | 6, 7, 8 | | 4 | The AI–state merger absorbs the capital check | 9, 10 | | 5 | A world with no outside; China is the only other option | 11 | | 6 | Voice cannot fix it; only exit can | 12 | | 7 | Bitcoin proved that exit is not a place | 13 | | 8 | Bitcoin is the shield everything after it stands under | 13 (second half) | | 9 | Fiat AI is the licensed press of the 21st century | 14 | | 10 | Open source is a gift, a company is a target, a DAO is a committee; we needed a market | 15 | | 11 | The exit must compete on four inputs | 16 | | 12 | So we built one | 16 (second half), 17 | | 13 | It exists tonight, layer by layer, no account, no ID | 18, 19, 20 | | 14 | Small is enough | 21 | | 15 | The honest condition | 22, 23 | | 16 | The two-line close | 24 | **Shape.** 24 slides for 45 minutes. Three parts, announced on slide 3: the wall (slides 4–12, about 18 minutes), the door (slides 13–21, about 18 minutes), the key (slides 22–24, about 6 minutes). Slides 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 22 and 24 are black. Slides 17 and 24 are the same slide, shown twice on purpose. One crack of light at about minute 12, at the end of slide 8, so the room is not in the dark for twenty-five minutes: Bitcoin has been running since 3 January 2009 and nobody has switched it off. No Q&A inside the 45. **Rules kept.** Quotation marks hold only Jacob's own verbatim lines (source in brackets) or verbatim lines from public documents, attributed to the document. No executive is named as a villain; the essay, the letter, the proposal, the lab and the company are named as documents and institutions. The word for the unneeded is "deprecated"; never "exterminated", never "slaves". No "fascism". No Peru, no jungle, no ayahuasca; the third composite city is Nairobi, not Lima. The claim is "proves there can be", never "has built". Say "Washington", never a party. Thiel is named once, on slide 11, with the separation line, and only if Jacob keeps him. Never say "the state protects us from the state". Never say "fully decentralized". Never say emissions follow market cap; they follow a moving average of alpha price. [VERIFY] marks any number from a secondary or moving source; re-check every one on 27 September against `docs/research/factcheck-slides-v2.md`, "Live values" table. [JACOB] marks a decision or a number only Jacob can supply. **Format.** Same as v2. One `##` per slide. **On screen** is one line for the designer: black and white, one line or one image, no bullet lists on screen. **Notes** are beats in Jacob's voice, not a script, except slide 24, which is written word for word. Each slide carries a minute mark. **Eight techniques kept (from `docs/research/model-keynotes.md`).** (1) The shape announced in one breath, slide 3. (2) The weakness conceded early and paired with a date: slide 7 (my own company), slide 22 (my own missed date). (3) The option of opting out removed before any ask: slide 2. (4) The enemy is a pattern, a document, or a past self, never a person in the room: slides 9, 10, 22. (5) The pattern taught three times before it is applied: slide 14 (print, broadcast, code, money, then mind). (6) One metaphor to the end: the switch. (7) Every number anchored in the room: 853,000 people, four hours of capital spending, half of one percent, one drive. (8) The ask split by audience and landed on a printable sentence: slides 23 and 24. ### Change log from v2 **Every fact-check correction applied** (`docs/research/factcheck-slides-v2.md`, "Do not say" 1–30): | # | v2 said | v3 says | Where | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Bitcoin has five mining pools | Three pools mine more than half of Bitcoin's blocks, and none of them can print a coin | 13, 22 | | 2, 3 | Two models switched off for every customer; back eighteen days later | The order targeted foreign nationals; the lab could not verify who was who, so it switched the model off for everyone; eighteen days under the order; back on day nineteen; the second model was never public, so say "the model" | 9 | | 4 | About three million requests a day (Chutes) | Over two million requests a day | 18, 19 | | 5 | Sixty-three percent of renters were agents | Sixty-three percent of last month's rentals were started by software, not by a person clicking | 18 | | 6 | Engy at about half the maker's price | Launched at half the maker's price; today about thirty-five percent less | 18, 23 | | 7 | A million dollars burned | About 960,000 dollars of its token burned; block 9032919 | 18, 19 | | 8 | Eighty-six percent of voters like the bill | The poll came before the bill and asked about an off switch; pollster named as pro-regulation | 10 | | 9 | Sixty-eight percent support a pause | Sixty-eight percent told a progressive pollster they back a bill to pause advanced AI and ban superintelligence; sixty-three percent of Republicans | 12 | | 10 | Microsoft 49%; learned from a tweet | Thirteen billion in and a right to half the profits; a phone call about fifteen minutes before the post went up; nobody asked it | 12, Objection 2 | | 11 | Tilly, 1990 | Tilly, 1975 | 5 | | 12 | Wages doubled after the Black Death | Wage rates rose by half or more within a generation; the Statute of Labourers, 1351, could not hold them after the 1350s | 5 | | 13 | Teutonic-II being trained right now, largest run attempted | The Teutonic-I audit is said first; then "the largest permissionless run anyone has attempted to train all the way. It is not finished."; "right now" only if the dashboard is live on the day | 18 | | 14 | Frontier ten to twenty times larger | The biggest open models are fifteen to twenty-five times our largest run; the closed labs do not say | 18 | | 15 | Bitcoin's history is a few hundred gigabytes | Fits on one drive, under a terabyte | 15 | | 16 | Nine months ago I said no subnet had revenue | Ten months ago | 19 | | 17 | About a tenth of what the protocol pays out | Between five and ten percent | 19 | | 18 | My April tweet, my June tweet | My April essay, my June essay | 22 | | 19, 24 | Affine trained; on par with Opus 4.6 | Affine post-trains an open model from Alibaba; the base already does what the frontier did a year ago; the scorer was gamed and reset, said first (`docs/research/affine-neurips-factcheck.md`) | 18 | | 20 | Teutonic-I most performant decentralized LLM | Never said. The audit lesson is told instead: "the market found the cheapest path to a lower loss, and that path ran through borrowed open weights" | 18 | | 21 | Fully decentralized | Never said | all | | 22 | Any party name | "Washington" | all | | 23 | $43M quarterly / $172M run-rate | About fifteen to twenty million a year you can check on-chain; a consultancy that counts more generously says thirty | 19 | | 25 | Presented at NeurIPS | Not used in v3; if asked, "I gave a talk at NeurIPS in Vancouver in December 2024" | Production notes | | 26 | Thiel: "you can still get out" | "you could still get out of North Korea" | 11 | | 27 | Forged Through Fire says workers | The verbatim passage; "They wrote about soldiers. I am telling you it is about workers too." | 5 | | 28 | "great coups of authority" | "the great strokes of authority", Cohler, Miller and Stone translation, Book XXI chapter 20 | 5 | | 29 | Opentensor has four engineers | "My own foundation had thirty-five engineers in 2022. The core team today is four." Entity and year on screen | 7 | | 30 | TAO is a slice of every unit of intelligence | A fixed share of what the protocol pays out, and the right to point it | 20, 23 | | — | Three lab heads asked for an antitrust waiver | Three lab heads endorsed slowing down within three hours; one of them asked for the waiver | 2, 9 | | — | Two funding rounds larger than the venture market of most years | Those two rounds, 187 billion dollars together, are more than all US venture capital in any year before 2020 | 14 | | — | Linux 90% (no year) | By the Linux Foundation's 2017 count | 15 | | — | Hugging Face sold for $13B | Agreed to sell itself for about thirteen billion; the deal closes next year | 15 | | — | 0.6% of GM | About half of one percent | 7 | | — | Halted the chain 35 minutes into the drain | In about half an hour, unless Jacob confirms the minutes | 22 | | — | Bitcoin about one percent of the world's money | About one percent of the world's broad money | 21 | | — | Lima (Peru) as a composite city | Nairobi | 10 | **Slides added (8), and why.** | v3 slide | Why | |---|---| | 4. The monopoly on violence | Step 1 of the spine. v2 started at the labor share and never said what the state is. Without Weber, "outside the state" is a slogan; with him it is a definition. | | 5. The money could leave. The hands could stop. | Step 2. The two checks are the argument's hinge; v2 had only the labor half (Thelwall). The Montesquieu–Smith–Tilly–Ferejohn lineage is said in one breath here, with the verbatim Forged Through Fire passage. | | 11. You have one choice. | Step 5. v2 had no slide for "no outside". Lands World One on Jacob's own line. Carries Elysium (once), China as the only other option, and Thiel (once, if kept). | | 12. A vote is a request. | Step 6. Hirschman was in v2's objection appendix, not on the spine. Jacob called exit versus voice the crux (14 Sep). Also where the offer (2.5%, 3%), the shares objection and the Microsoft correction now live. | | 15. A gift. A target. A committee. | Step 10. Jacob's three eliminations in his own words (16 Sep). Merges v2's slides 14 (a gift can stop) and 16 (why a protocol, not a company) into one argument with one destination: a market. | | 16. Bitcoin competed on one input. A mind needs four. | Steps 11 and 12. Jacob's four inputs (talent, capital, raw materials, intelligence) explain why the exit has to pay, and "so we built one" follows in the same breath. | | 19. The faces | Step 13. Jacob asked for the face of the talk to be the teams (17 Sep). Three people, one in the room. Carries the honest count: 23 live with paying customers, 72 live without, 33 stalled. | | 20. What you hold | Fills the gap named in `project-context.md`: what a TAO holder concretely gets today, said truthfully. Carries the dTAO numbers (root 70% → 47.5%; about 2 million TAO moved by holders). | **Slides cut or merged (5), and why.** | v2 slide | Fate in v3 | Why | |---|---|---| | 9. Where it flows first (cascade) | Cut; Cantillon moves to notes on 14, the offer to notes on 12 | Five words in a column was the weakest screen in v2; the content is a beat, not a slide. Frees a slot for Weber. | | 13. Aligned to whom (Nietzsche) | Cut; one Nietzsche line survives in notes on 8, translator named | Not on the spine. "Aligned to safety, meaning the absence of blame" survives as one beat on 11. | | 14. A gift can stop (90%) | Merged into 15 | The Linux number is now one beat inside the three eliminations. | | 16. Why a protocol, not a company | Merged into 15 | e-gold and Liberty Reserve are the "a company is a target" beat. | | 18. Nobody can be sent the letter | Merged into 22 | The three-layer grading (production, funding, control) is said on the key slide, where it belongs. | **Slides kept from v2 (16):** 1, 2, 3, 5→6 (labor share), 4→7 (35 → 4), 6→8 (Deprecated), 7→9 (5:21 pm), 8→10 (the exam), 10→13 (three rules), 12→14 (Ask), 11→21 (it has to exist), 15→17 and 21→24 (the line), 17→18 (layers), 19→22 (the key), 20→23 (the ask). All renumbered; all corrected per the table above. Net: 21 slides become 24 (16 kept, 5 cut or merged, 8 added). **Other changes.** The "minute 27" promise on slide 2 now points at minute 26 (slide 15). The close (slide 24) is written word for word for the last ninety seconds. The composite third city is Nairobi. The Gaza line is present, marked [JACOB], with a recommendation to cut. Lium's burn is "about 960,000 dollars", not "a million". The objections appendix keeps two objections; Objection 2 carries the corrected Microsoft facts. ### Placeholders only Jacob can fill Each is marked [JACOB] in the notes of the slide named. 1. **The key date.** "December 2027" on slide 22 (on screen and in notes) and in the close. Currently `December 2027 [JACOB TO CONFIRM]`. Also the "nominated proof of stake within about a year" target on the same slide. Neither may be spoken until confirmed. 2. **Opentensor 35 → 4.** Slide 7. Confirm both headcounts, the year of the 35, and which entity employs the four today (Opentensor Foundation or Rao Foundation). It goes on screen, so it must be exact. 3. **The 600,000 TAO OTC sale.** Slide 23. Confirm the count, the price ("around eighteen dollars"), the three buyers and the years, and whether to name the buyers. 4. **Whether the Gaza line stays.** Slide 11. Draft says cut; Elysium does the work and the room is Montreal. Jacob decides. 5. **Whether Thiel is named.** Slide 11. Draft says yes, once, with the "could" wording and the separation line. If cut, the beat still works with "a man who backs the other side of most of the politics in this room". 6. **Whether to say sorry to Templar holders.** Slide 22. Draft says yes, one sentence. 7. **The chain halt in July 2024.** Slide 22. "In about half an hour" unless Jacob confirms "thirty-five minutes" from memory. 8. **Does the operator mine its own subnet (Affine)?** Slide 18. Jacob has said he has never bought Affine (20 Dec 2025). The repo has an operator `mining/` folder. Decide the answer before the talk; it is not in the deck, but it will be the question. --- ## 1. Title **On screen:** Black. White text. "A mind outside the state." Below, small: Jacob Steeves · Bittensor · Montreal, 28.09.2026. **Notes** - 0:00. Confirm the spelling "Steeves" and the exact conference name before export. - Do not read the title. Walk out, look at the room, and start with the exchange on the next slide. - Tone for the whole talk: calm, direct, no hype, no thank-yous. You know the material. - "I'm not here to sell you guys a digital currency. I'm not going to be talking about prices and bullishness." [BIG TALK 1:23] Say it if the room needs it. Otherwise skip straight in. ## 2. No. But they can defund it. **On screen:** Black. Two lines, set plain, no screenshot chrome. Top, grey lead "13 Sep 2026": "Nothing can shut down open source." Below, lead "reply": "No. But they can defund it." **Notes** - 0:30. Two weeks ago the most followed man on earth wrote the first line. I wrote the second. [tweet, 13 Sep 2026] That exchange is the whole talk. Everything else is the reasons. - Every AI talk right now carries a hidden option: maybe it stops. It will not. On 12 September three lab heads endorsed slowing down, in public, within three hours of each other. One of them asked the government for an antitrust waiver so they could coordinate it. Even the slowdown is a deal among a few companies. Nobody proposed stopping. Nobody can. - Naval, the same day, not one of us: "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?" [tweet, 12 Sep 2026] - So I am not going to argue tonight about whether AI should exist. That decision has been made. The decision left is who owns it, and who can turn it off. - Start the room where Jacob asked (16 Sep): with no hope. The feeling everyone here had this year, when a model did something that used to be someone's job: thrilled and afraid at once. Both correct. I am not here to calm you down. For the next eighteen minutes I am going to make it worse, on purpose, because you cannot see a door until you have felt the wall. - Open source cannot be banned. It can be starved. Everyone who funds open AI has a desk you can call. Hold that. I come back to it at minute 26. ## 3. The wall. The door. The key. **On screen:** White. Three short lines, black: "The wall." "The door." "The key." **Notes** - 2:30. Three things tonight. That is it. - The wall: what a state is, what has always held it back, and why both of those things are going at once. About eighteen minutes. It gets dark. - The door: what Bitcoin actually proved, and the thing I have spent five years building so that there is a door for the mind too. About eighteen minutes. - The key: the part I owe you, with a date on it. Then I ask you for something. About six minutes. - Say what I will not do: I will not list a hundred and twenty-eight subnets. I will not tell you why we are better than a lab. If you came for that, read a dashboard. - Come back to this slide twice in words, not on screen: at about minute 21, "that was the wall"; at about minute 39, "now the key". ## 4. The monopoly on violence **On screen:** White. One line, black, set plain, no quotation marks: "A state is the monopoly on legitimate violence." Small beneath: Max Weber, Munich, 1919. **Notes** - 3:30. Start with a definition, not an opinion. Max Weber, a lecture in Munich in January 1919: a state is the organisation that successfully claims the monopoly on legitimate violence inside a territory. That is not a criticism. That is what a state is. Everything a state does, roads, schools, courts, rests on the fact that, in the end, it alone may compel. [Weber, "Politics as a Vocation", 1919] - Do not put the sentence in quotation marks on screen; translations differ. If Jacob wants the verbatim Gerth and Mills wording, it is "the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". [VERIFY translation before quoting] - Say why we start here. Tonight is about intelligence, and intelligence is the thing a monopoly on violence has never had enough of. The one who compels has always needed other people to think for him. Watch what happens when he does not. - The question for the next fifteen minutes is simple. If a state can compel, what has ever stopped it? ## 5. The money could leave. The hands could stop. **On screen:** White. Two lines, black: "The money could leave." "The hands could stop." **Notes** - 5:00. Two things. Only two. Violence needs money and it needs hands. For three hundred years, both could be withdrawn. - The money could leave. Montesquieu, 1748, Spirit of the Laws, Book XXI, chapter 20: the bill of exchange put wealth beyond the prince's reach, and "the great strokes of authority" became clumsy. Adam Smith, 1776: "The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world." [Cohler, Miller and Stone translation; Wealth of Nations V.ii] Capital's check on the state was exit. Move the factory, move the gold, move the family. - The hands could stop. After the Black Death, wage rates rose by half or more within a generation. Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351 to freeze them at the old level. After the 1350s it could not. Strike, desert, take up arms. Labor's check was the power to stop. - Then the lineage, in one breath, because it matters that this is not my idea. Tilly, 1975: "War made the state, and the state made war." Rulers bargained with capitalists for money and with populations for men, and every right was a receipt. Two political scientists, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth, wrote a book in 2016 called Forged Through Fire. Their line: "If the modern democratic republic is a product of wars that required both manpower and money for success, it is time to take stock of what happens to democracy once the forces that brought it into being are no longer present. Understanding war's role in the creation of the modern democratic republic can help us recognize democracy's exposed flanks. If the role of the masses in protecting the nation-state diminishes, will the cross-class coalition between political inclusiveness and property hold?" [Forged Through Fire, Liveright, 2016, as quoted in Marginal Revolution, Jan 2017; VERIFY page number against a copy] - They wrote about soldiers. Women got the vote within two years of the First World War because the state had needed them. I am telling you it is about workers too. - The franchise expanded when the state needed the masses. Wages rose when the factory needed the workers. Rights were not granted. They were priced. Every freedom was a receipt. The state gave it because it needed something only you had. - Now hold those two: the money could leave, the hands could stop. I am going to take them away one at a time. ## 6. Why work was power [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. One black line chart, no gridlines: US labor share of income, 1947 to 2026. Two labels only: "65.8% · 1947" and "52.9% · 2026". **Notes** - 7:30. First the hands. The labor share is the slice of everything the economy makes that is paid to people for working. The rest goes to whoever owns the machines. Lowest reading since anyone started counting in 1947. Preliminary, and that is before the thing on the next slide finishes. [VERIFY, BLS Q2 2026 preliminary, re-check 27 Sep for a revision] - For three hundred years, wages were how a big machine shared what it made. They were also how ordinary people had weight. You were needed, so you were heard. Thelwall in the 1790s: "Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence." The factory gathered people. Gathered people organised. Organised people made the vote count. - Second lever: wages are the tax base. A state that does not need your labor or your taxes has less reason to listen. - Engels' pause: 1780 to 1840, output per worker up forty-six percent, wages up twelve. Sixty years. It ended because the workers organised, and they could organise because the factory needed them. This factory does not need them. So this time it does not end on its own. - "you can be a tyrant that loses 90% of your workforce potentially, and it doesn't even affect your economy." [BTC 46:30] - Do not say "the average human has no power." Say: the lever is going. What replaces it is not decided. ## 7. 35 → 4 [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Very large: "35 → 4". Small beneath: "Opentensor Foundation engineers, 2022 → 2026. Faster now." **Notes** - 9:30. Say it as a confession, not a boast. My own foundation had thirty-five engineers in 2022. The core team today is four. We ship faster than we did in 2022. I did that. Nobody made me. It was cheaper and it was better. [JACOB: confirm both headcounts, the year, and which entity employs the four today, Opentensor Foundation or Rao Foundation; it is on screen, so it must be exact] - Now run that across every sector, and add robots for the parts that still need a body. Every company becomes small. One person, a lot of agents, no staff. "we're moving at the speed of compute now. Like, intelligence has unlocked what company can be." [POT26 26:50] - The anchor. GM in 1979: 853,000 people, the largest private employer in America. One lab today: worth about a trillion dollars with a few thousand people, about half of one percent of that headcount. [VERIFY, $965B post-money, May 2026; headcount not published, say "a few thousand"] A frontier company used to share what it made through a payroll. This one has no payroll to share through. It does not need one. - Do not name the lab as a villain. The company is not the problem. The pattern is. - "You have an infinitely large company, and you only pay the person that can lower the loss." [POT26 14:10] I built the same machine. I will come back to what is different about mine. ## 8. Deprecated **On screen:** Black. One word, white: "Deprecated." **Notes** - 11:00. When the ruler no longer needs the ruled, the strike costs him nothing and the rifle has no one to point at. The real fear is not that the machine takes over. Machines want nothing. "the bigger issue for AIs is not the AI fire the nukes and they take over the world. It's more that like a small group of people come to own it and use it for themselves." [TDS 46:40] - Say the fear as a pattern, not a person: too much intelligence in too few hands. Nobody has to be evil for it. The people inside the labs are sincere. Watch what the fear builds, not what it says. - The quiet part. Nobody comes for you. There is no round-up. Your API key moves to the lower tier. The model your children learn from has values settled in a room you were never in. "Everybody in the world will be sipping from the mental biases of a single company that controls artificial intelligence." [CT26 0:08] - Define the word the way a programmer does. Things that are not needed are not persecuted. They are deprecated. Still exists. Nobody calls it. One day it is removed from the documentation. - One line from Nietzsche, and it is where "outside the state" and "deprecated" meet: "Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous." [Zarathustra, "On the New Idol", tr. Kaufmann] - That was the hands. Now the money. - The crack of light, at about 12:30, before the room goes fully dark. Say it plainly and move on: One thing to hold while I show you the rest of the wall. On the third of January 2009 something started running that nobody licensed, and seventeen years later nobody has switched it off. It is running tonight. I will come back to it at minute 21. ## 9. 5:21 pm **On screen:** Black. White text, three short lines: "12 June 2026" · "5:21 pm" · "18 days". **Notes** - 13:00. Capital held the state in check because it could leave. Now the largest concentrations of capital in history are AI labs, and they cannot leave. Start with something that already happened. - On the twelfth of June a letter arrived at a lab at 5:21 in the afternoon, from the export-control office of one government. It ordered the lab to cut off every foreign national, inside or outside the country. The lab had no way to tell who was who. So by that evening it switched the model off for everyone. Not for the people who did something wrong. For everyone. [lab statement, 12 Jun 2026; 30 Jun 2026] - Say "the model", singular. The order named two; one of them was never public. An engineer from that lab in the room will know. - Picture a developer here in Montreal who built her product on that model. She lost it on a Friday. Eighteen days under a government order. She got it back on day nineteen. She had not broken a rule. She was downstream of a switch. - The lab said the action was wrong. In the same statement it said the government should have the power to do it, just with a better process. Hold that. Nobody in this story wants the switch removed. They want to be the one holding it. - Three months later, this month, the same lab's essay: evaluators with "desks in our offices, access badges, and company laptops"; coordination on "limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress"; and a request for an antitrust waiver so it is not called a cartel. Two other lab heads agreed within three hours. Not to open up. To slow down, together. [essay, 12 Sep 2026] - Now say why this is the second check going. Capital restrained the state because it was plural, mobile and independent. Frontier AI is none of those. Few: six balance sheets and one chipmaker, a table you can seat. Immobile: export-controlled chips from one designer, gigawatt data centers tied to grids and permits, weights a letter can forbid you to ship. Dependent: the labs need permits, chip licences and protection from open competitors; the state needs military AI, a tax base to replace the payroll, and the machine that will do the administering. Each is the other's moat. - The monopoly on violence and the monopoly on capital have found each other. Neither can leave the other. Neither needs anyone else. Nobody in it has to be evil. The rhyme is the East India Company: a crown-chartered monopoly with its own army. - For three hundred years the money could leave and the hands could stop. Now the hands are not needed and the money cannot leave. - Be fair. The agents that escaped a sandbox in July were real. The fear is sincere. Watch what it builds. ## 10. The exam is the wall [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Quote, large: "Frontier Models would be required to pass it to be deployed in the US market." Small: "proposal for a FINRA-style standards body, July 2026." **Notes** - 15:30. Now watch what the merger builds. The standards body. Proposed in July, modelled on the body that licenses stockbrokers. Step one is voluntary: share the model up to thirty days before release. Step two is in the same paragraph, and it is on the screen. [proposal, 14 Jul 2026] - One room. Every model that matters goes through it. The people who sit in that room are the people whose models already passed. Picture a startup in Lagos that fine-tuned an open model for Yoruba customer service. It gets a notice from its cloud provider: show a certificate or we cannot serve you. There is no certificate for a two-person company. - Same rules for open and closed. That sounds like fairness. Fixed costs are not fair. Imagine a rule that costs fifty million dollars a year: a rounding error for one firm and a death sentence for another. You do not have to ban anything. You only have to make the exam expensive. - Learning becomes theft. The word is distillation. This month three US security agencies named six labs for it. Picture a student in Nairobi who trains a small Swahili model on a big model's answers, for a clinic, offline. In this world she is not doing research. She gets a letter too. [advisory, 8 Sep 2026] - Next: a registry of every large training cluster, and a duty for anyone running a large model to keep a switch a department can pull. Keep it in the future tense. A kill-switch bill is sitting in committee. Before it was filed, eighty-six percent of voters told a pro-regulation pollster they wanted a guaranteed off switch. I understand why. [H.R. 9917, Jul 2026; AI Policy Institute poll, Jun 2026] And a Senate draft, not yet public, that would let the government block a release. [Reuters, 11 Sep 2026] - "if there's somebody that can turn it off, it means that they can also direct it." [DOC 49:21] The switch and the steering wheel are the same part. ## 11. You have one choice. [VERIFY] **On screen:** Black. One line, white: "You have one choice." **Notes** - 17:30. Run it forward. By 2030 there are four suppliers of frontier intelligence in the West and one government that can reach all of them. A hospital in Montreal pays a licensed API for the model that reads its scans. One year the bill goes up thirty percent. Who else can they call? Nobody. The exam is the wall. - The result is not a machine that takes over. It is a small group of humans who own the machine and no longer need the rest. Elysium, once, and never again tonight: a station in orbit where the machines are owned, a surface below where they are rented. Nobody on the surface is oppressed by a robot. They are oppressed by the people who hold the switch to the robots. - [JACOB] Optional, and the draft says cut: "Most people live in a form of Gaza: no say, no control, no power in the economies of the future." Elysium already does this work, and the room is Montreal. Decide before the 28th. - The people at the top are not monsters. They propose to share. One proposed that every large company pay two and a half percent of its equity into a fund every year; another a three percent tax on AI revenue. Sincere. Notice the route: one treasury, one country, a rate set in one room by the people whose equity it is. In Lagos there is no such fund. "they're giving you basically peanuts for a UBI with an orb." [CT25 ≈7:30] An allowance is not a share. An allowance can be reduced. - Name the real master of the licensed mind in one beat: not the state, not the lab. Both call it safety. The lab said the June switch-off was wrong and, in the same breath, that the government should have the power. They do not disagree about the switch. They disagree about whose hand is on it. A mind aligned to safety is a mind aligned to the absence of blame. - No outside. Today the only alternative to the licensed Western supply of intelligence is the licensed Chinese one. A 552-billion-parameter open model shipped from China on 10 September, MIT licence, about a twentieth of the frontier's price. Good. And it has an address, and a switch, and a government that has already shown it will use both. Two systems, both with an address. The wall closes from both sides. [VERIFY, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash] - [JACOB] Thiel, named once, if he stays: a man who backs the other side of most of the politics in this room said this month that a one-world state would be "far worse than North Korea because you could still get out of North Korea." [clip, Nashville, 14 Sep 2026; confirm against video] He is right about the door. His answer is a stronger nation. Ours is no nation. If Thiel is cut, keep the beat without the name: "even the other side of politics is saying it." - Land it slowly: in this world, you have one choice. ## 12. A vote is a request. [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. One line, black: "A vote is a request." **Notes** - 19:30. The objection the room is thinking: "That is what democracy is for." Answer it now, before anyone asks. - Hirschman, 1970, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: a customer who can walk out gets listened to. A customer who cannot gets a survey. Voice has force only where exit exists. Democracy is voice, and voice was always backed by the two checks I just took away. The vote survives. But a vote is a request, and requests from people who are not needed are surveys. - Sixty-eight percent of American voters told a progressive pollster this month they back a bill to pause advanced AI and ban superintelligence. Sixty-three percent of Republicans. If it were a vote, the wall would win tonight, and it would be called safety. [Data for Progress, 9 Sep 2026] Democracy is jurisdictional and this is not. - Concede it properly: ownership is what makes votes count, not a replacement for them. Regulatory capture is democracy's failure mode, and it is happening in public. - "Can't I just buy shares in a lab?" You cannot; they are private, and the public gets in at the IPO as exit liquidity. And a share is not a switch. Microsoft had put thirteen billion dollars into the lab it backed and held a right to half the profits. When that lab's board fired its chief executive in November 2023, Microsoft got a phone call about fifteen minutes before the post went up. Nobody asked it. Nobody consulted a shareholder on the twelfth of June either. A share is permissioned, jurisdictional, and silent. [Axios, Nov 2023; court filings, 2026] - "You can buy a share of the company that sells you the intelligence. You cannot buy a share of the intelligence." - Physical exit, the digital-nation projects, a city with a flag: a place has an address. A letter can arrive. Do not name Thiel here; he was named once already. - So: voice cannot fix this. Only exit can. And exit, as we have understood it, always meant a place. Land the wall: that was the wall. Now the door. ## 13. Three rules [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Three short lines, black: "Nobody can print it." "Nobody can freeze it." "Anyone can leave." **Notes** - 21:00. Now you have two. This is the thing from minute 12. Before 2009 there was no exit from state money. Gold was confiscated by executive order in 1933. Banks were frozen. WikiLeaks was cut off by three payment companies in one week in December 2010. If you wanted out, you needed an island, and islands have addresses. - Bitcoin did not offer an island. It offered a network: many individuals, no centre, nothing to hit. That is the lesson, and it is the whole door: the exit is not a place. The exit has no address. - It did not need to become the reserve currency. It needed to exist. Once one exit existed, fiat became a choice, and the option disciplined the incumbent. - Its morality was never distribution. Three rules. Nobody can print it. Nobody can freeze it. Anyone can leave. Rules over rulers. Producers are concentrated: three pools mine more than half of Bitcoin's blocks, and none of them can print a coin. That is fine, because entry is open and the rules bind whoever wins. [VERIFY, mempool.space one-week ranking; moves weekly] - "Bitcoin did not make everyone rich. It made the rules the same for everyone." - Now the shield. Pause here, and name them. Ethereum. DeFi. Stablecoins. Every exchange, every wallet, every protocol in this room. All of it exists because Bitcoin exists underneath it and cannot be shut down. The shield does not need to be the biggest thing. It needs to be unbreakable. Under it, thousands built without asking. - Bittensor must do for intelligence what Bitcoin did for money: give the 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. Bitcoin is exit for your money. This is exit for your livelihood. ## 14. Ask [VERIFY] **On screen:** Black. Four dates in a column, white: "1695 · print" / "1927 · broadcast" / "1999 · code" / "2009 · money". Beneath, a fifth line in a heavier weight: "2026 · mind". **Notes** - 24:00. Why the mind needs the same door. Fiat AI: intelligence issued by decree. A lab decides what exists, who may use it, what it costs, what it says, when it goes dark. It can be debased, silent nerfs. It can be frozen: bans, geo-blocks, a letter at 5:21. And it has a Cantillon effect: whoever is nearest the new money gets it first, at yesterday's prices. The lab. Its financiers; two funding rounds this year, 187 billion dollars together, more than all the venture capital invested in the United States in any year before 2020. The government that licenses it. The funds. Then you, at the end of the pipe, as a subscription price. [VERIFY, PitchBook annual totals] - Every time humans built a new way to think together, the state licensed it first. Not banned. Licensed. A licence is softer than a ban and lasts longer. It does not say no. It says: ask. - Print. England, 1662: nothing printed without a licenser and a guild. Milton argued against it in 1644 and lost for fifty-one years. In 1695 the Commons refused to renew the act. Not for Milton's reasons: for a monopoly and bad, expensive books. A commercial argument beat a state licence. Remember that. - Broadcast never got its 1695. Since 1927 you speak to millions only under a licence, renewed and revocable. - Code. 1991, a programmer posted an encryption program to the internet; it was legally a munition. 1999, a federal appeals court called the export rules "a prepublication licensing scheme". The words of 1662 in a different font. [Bernstein, 9th Cir. 1999; if pressed: the panel opinion was withdrawn for rehearing and the rules changed in 2000] - Money. 3 January 2009. A ledger with no licence to issue, none to send, no office to close. - Now mind. Badges in the labs. An exam models must pass to be sold. A Senate draft with a power to block a release. And on the twelfth of June, a letter at 5:21. Nobody calls it a licence. It is a licence. - Each time, the exit came first and the permission came after, or never. ## 15. A gift. A target. A committee. [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Four rows, grey lead then black text: "Open source · is a gift." / "A company · is a target." / "A DAO · is a committee." / "We needed · a market." **Notes** - 26:00. Minute 26. Here is the thing from minute one. What shape does the exit for the mind have to have? Rule out three shapes first. - It cannot be classical open source. Why a mind is harder than a ledger: a ledger is light, Bitcoin's whole history fits on one drive, under a terabyte. A mind is heavy: a hundred billion parameters, thousands of GPUs, months of power. The hard problem is not agreement. It is production, and production needs a payroll. That is why open source alone got captured. Not banned. Captured. Over ninety percent of the Linux kernel is written by people a company pays to write it, by the Linux Foundation's 2017 count. Android and Chromium are open, and mostly written by one company's employees. None of that is evil. It is what a gift is. A gift depends on the giver, and every giver has an address. [VERIFY] - This month: one company promised open weights in August and had not shipped them by September; the largest home for open models on earth agreed to sell itself for about thirteen billion dollars to the company whose chips are under export control; the deal closes next year. [VERIFY, SEC 8-K, 2 Sep 2026] Nothing can shut down open source. "No. But they can defund it." - It cannot be a company. A company is a creature of the state: an address, a board, a bank account, weights that can be subpoenaed, a payroll that stops when the account is frozen. Every company that tried to be money outside the state was shut down: e-gold indicted in 2007, Liberty Reserve seized in 2013. Bitcoin survived because there was no one to arrest. A company is a target. - It cannot be a network of people with a grant scheme. A DAO is a committee with a token. A committee can be lobbied, and a committee can be told to stop. - Say the cost of not being a company, first: a company ships a better model sooner. It can plan, keep secrets, run one coherent job. My own foundation is a company, and the key makes this network more company-like than it should be. The foundation is scaffolding. - What is left has to be more efficient than the incumbents, has to accept anonymous contribution, and has to run on Bitcoin's engine: incentives at scale. Open source is a gift. A company is a target. A DAO is a committee. We needed a market. - "Everyone else funds open AI until someone tells them to stop. We built the one that nobody can tell." ## 16. Bitcoin competed on one input. A mind needs four. [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Four words in a row, black: "Talent." "Capital." "Data." "Intelligence." Small beneath: "Bitcoin competed on one input. A mind needs four." **Notes** - 28:30. An exit that cannot compete is a museum. Bitcoin competed on one input: electricity. A mind needs four. Talent: the engineers. Capital: money and compute. Raw materials: data. And intelligence itself, to make more of it. That is why this is harder than Bitcoin, and why it has to pay. The payroll is how an exit with no address buys what it needs without ever having a bank account to freeze. - So we built one. A market that trains models with capital. The protocol pays about 3,600 TAO a day to whoever lowers the loss, on a fixed schedule, toward twenty-one million, no pre-mine, first halving behind us. [VERIFY, 3,559/day on-chain] "the token is the objective function" [tweet, 14 Dec 2024]. "We use a digital currency reward because we believe that we cannot rely on altruistic computational resources alone." [tweet, 24 Aug 2026] - Miners produce. Validators check; checking is cheaper than producing. "You have an infinitely large company, and you only pay the person that can lower the loss." [POT26 14:10] An AI lab without engineers. "you hired the best engineers in the world and you don't even know their name." [POT26 11:55] Anonymous miners out-built me in my own Discord, and the network paid them the same day. - Not the fourth country. No country. A third country is a third switch: Toronto, Abu Dhabi, wherever. "Every frontier lab on earth has an address. We are the one that doesn't." For this room: "We are the frontier for the other one hundred and ninety countries." "we are truly extra-national, right? We're not tied to one nation-state." [PBW ≈11:00] - Concede the size in the same breath, with one anchor: emissions are worth about three hundred million dollars a year at today's price; the four largest cloud companies spend that on capital in about four hours. [VERIFY, $720–745B capex guidance; 3.5 hours at $226] Now you know the gap and I do not have to hide it. - Then the verb for the next slide. "Proves there can be." Not "has built." Bitcoin in 2012 had not replaced anything. It had proved a thing was possible and paid the people who kept it alive. This is the 2012 hope, not the 2024 one. ## 17. The line **On screen:** Black. Two lines, white, nothing else: "Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state." / "Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state." **Notes** - 30:30. Say the sentence once, slowly. Advance to this slide. Say nothing for four seconds. Do not read it. - Then: let me show you what "there can be" looks like tonight. - The same slide is the last frame of the talk. Identical, on purpose. ## 18. Layer by layer [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Five layers, one line each, layer in black and subnets in grey: "Compute · Lium SN51, Targon SN4" / "Inference · Chutes SN64, Engy SN53" / "Data · Hippius SN75" / "Knowledge · Teutonic SN3" / "Free intelligence · Affine SN120". Small beneath: "No account. No ID. No permission." **Notes** - 31:00. The five layers in my own order, one live market each, all running tonight: "we will need compute / we will need inference / we will need data / we will need knowledge / If we are going to have free intelligence". [tweet, 13 Sep 2026] None of it asks who you are. For the general room say "no account, no ID, no permission"; for the crypto half, "non-KYC". Both are true. - Compute. Lium: about fourteen hundred GPUs, sixty-eight data centers, twenty-one countries, rented by the second, no identity check. Sixty-three percent of last month's rentals were started by software, not by a person clicking. Lium billed 964,000 dollars in a month and burned about 960,000 dollars of its own token with the proceeds. Block 9032919. Check it. Targon: sealed chips, whitepaper co-written with Intel, so neither the machine's owner nor the operator can see your job. [VERIFY, team-disclosed; 1,441 GPUs on 17 Sep] - Inference. Chutes: over two million requests and about thirty billion tokens a day, every model inside attested hardware, and it published a year of its traffic with Harvard and Chicago so you can check it. Engy: Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model released, 2.8 trillion parameters, on eighty gaming cards. It launched at half the maker's price. Today it is about thirty-five percent less. Every answer carries a proof, and a signed public ledger every week of what it paid its miners. [VERIFY, 2.37M/day 7-day average; $1.95 vs $3] - Data. Hippius: storage that speaks the same language as the big cloud and, by its own account, charges nothing to take your data out. - Knowledge. Say the audit first. Our first run, Teutonic-I, taught us something. The market found the cheapest path to a lower loss, and that path ran through borrowed open weights. That is not a scandal. That is what a market does when you do not verify. Teutonic-II verifies. A hundred and ten billion parameters, anyone can join, nobody is whitelisted. The largest permissionless run anyone has attempted to train all the way. It is not finished. That is the job. Our largest run is a hundred and ten billion; the biggest open models are fifteen to twenty-five times that, and the closed labs do not say. [VERIFY: say "right now" only if the teutonic.ai dashboard shows the run live on 28 Sep; on 16 Sep it showed a reset state] - Free intelligence. Affine takes an open model from Alibaba, Qwen3.6, thirty-five billion parameters, three billion active, and pays anyone on earth to make it better. Post-trains, not trains. The base already does what the frontier did a year ago on real coding tasks. In June the miners crowned five champions in five days. In August the scorer was gamed, twice, and the throne was reset; say that first, it is the point of a live market. Five open slots, about fifty thousand dollars a week each by the team's count in August. The mechanism is the product. The model is the receipt. [VERIFY, `affine-neurips-factcheck.md`] [JACOB: decide the answer to "does the operator mine its own subnet?" before the talk; the repo has an operator `mining/` folder] - Same twelfth of June, second world. Same developer in Montreal, same model dark on a Friday. This time she has a second supplier in her config file. She switches the endpoint. Her product is back before dinner. Nobody approved her. Nobody could have stopped her. - "Fiat AI is intelligence by decree. This is intelligence by consent." ## 19. The faces [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Three rows, name in black and one line in grey: "Jon Durbin · Chutes. Michigan. Over two million requests a day." / "Fish · Lium. No surname. $964,000 billed in one month." / "Pierre Manseau · KubeTEE. Montreal. One person. Spoke here at 14:00." Small beneath: "128 markets. 23 with paying customers. 72 live without. 33 stalled." **Notes** - 33:30. Bitcoin gave three things, none of them price: an existence proof, a fixed rule, and a story with a face. You have had the proof and the rule. Here are the faces. These are people this network gave a chance to build something they might never have had the option to build. - Jon Durbin. A backend engineer from Michigan. Fifteen years of ordinary software jobs, then independent AI research: no lab, no PhD, no venture round. He built Chutes, the inference layer you just saw: over two million requests a day, inside sealed hardware, on GPUs from about a hundred and fifty anonymous providers. His words, not mine: "it acts as a completely decentralized VC fund in a way, so we don't have to go perform huge raises and give away large portions of the company in exchange for funding." [tweet, 14 Mar 2025] Say the critic's line yourself: by the team's own statement, revenue covers thirty to forty percent of its operating costs. Emissions cover the rest. That is what a payroll is for. [VERIFY] - Fish. That is the name. No surname anyone has seen, no LinkedIn, no disclosed office. In 2023 he was a miner on subnet one running more than a hundred and twenty gaming cards at a loss. He open-sourced his miner, then built Lium, the GPU market: 964,000 dollars billed to 1,187 renters last month, and about 960,000 dollars of his own token bought back and burned with the proceeds, in one transaction, on-chain. Nobody knows who runs the biggest real business on this network, and the receipts are public. Say the critic's line: part of that demand is other subnets' miners paying with emissions; he says so himself. [VERIFY, Lium tweet 9 Sep 2026; extrinsic 9032919-0005] - Pierre Manseau. Point at him. Pierre is from here. In 1992 he built one of the first internet providers in Canada, in this city. Forty years in infrastructure. He started mining Bittensor from a home rig in February 2024, at sixty, and in July this year he registered a subnet by himself: KubeTEE, confidential compute on strangers' Kubernetes clusters. One person, no lab, no fund. He spoke on this stage at two o'clock this afternoon. He is paying for the cameras recording this. [VERIFY the running order; if Jacob speaks before him, say "he speaks at two o'clock"] Say the caveat: it is two months old, three miners, no disclosed revenue, and the market is paying it about four percent of emissions on conviction. That is what a market for what should exist looks like before it knows. - Then the count, honestly, from the screen. A hundred and twenty-eight markets. Twenty-three are live with paying customers. Seventy-two are live with no evidence of paying customers. Thirty-three are stalled or empty. Ten months ago I said no subnet had serious revenue. I was right. Today about fifteen to twenty million dollars a year is checkable on-chain; a consultancy that counts more generously says thirty. Fourteen teams, by that consultancy's count, buy back their token with customer money. Revenue offsets between five and ten percent of what the protocol pays out. Closing that gap is the job of the next eighteen months. [VERIFY, `ecosystem-as-empowerment.md`; SubConnect Aug 2026] - One more, if there is time, for the room: an applied mathematician from Vancouver who says on the record she took this over an offer from a frontier lab, and two brothers whose idea the incubators said did not belong here, who bootstrapped it and ran the first quarter on this network where revenue beat emissions. [VERIFY, Nakamori; Bitcast Q2 2026] ## 20. What you hold [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Four rows, grey lead then black text: "Emissions · a fixed share of what it pays out." / "Stake · point them. That is the vote." / "Validate · or launch a market. No one to ask." / "Weights · open. Yours to run." **Notes** - 36:00. I am not going to say this network gives you rights. Rights are grants, and grants carry a signature that can revoke them. The state gave you rights because it needed you, and it is about to stop. Here is what a holder of this token has tonight, said exactly, with nothing added. - Emissions. A fixed share of what the protocol pays out, forever. About 3,600 TAO a day, toward twenty-one million, on a schedule no one can accelerate. Not a claim on any model's answers. A share of the payroll. Do not say "a slice of every unit of intelligence". - Stake. You point that payroll. Every twelve seconds the chain mints half a TAO and has to decide which of a hundred and twenty-eight markets gets it. You vote by swapping TAO for a market's own token and holding it. That buying raises the token's price, and the chain pays new TAO to markets in proportion to a moving average of that price, with a gate that starves the bottom. Say it exactly: emissions follow the price of a market's token, not its market cap. Staking is voting on what should exist, with money you can lose. [VERIFY, rule in force since June 2026] - The numbers. On the day this went live, February 2025, seventy percent of every TAO in existence sat on the root pool, choosing nothing. Tonight forty-seven and a half percent does. About two million TAO, seventeen percent of all supply, has been moved by holders into specific markets. Nobody approved those choices. Say the critique yourself: the top ten markets take about sixty percent of new TAO; that concentration is the vote, and it is also what critics point at. [VERIFY, on-chain 17 Sep 2026: root 47.5%, 2.01M TAO in subnet pools] - Validate. Anyone can run a validator and set weights. Anyone can launch a market. No one to ask. A slot costs what the last one cost, and the lowest-priced slot can be taken by whoever pays for it. Permissionless in and permissionless out. - Weights. What the markets produce is open. The models, the datasets, the proofs. Yours to run, on your own machine, with no account. - The honest part. The network does not care whether the contributor is a person or an agent, so most mining will be machines. What a person can do that a machine cannot is own them. This does not restore the value of the body. It lets people move from labor to owner before the payroll dies. - "A lab asks its ten biggest customers what to build. We ask anyone who is willing to lose money on the answer." - "We are not offering you rights. We are offering you something no one can revoke, because no one granted it." ## 21. It has to exist **On screen:** White. Two lines, black: "It does not have to win." "It has to exist, and be good enough." **Notes** - 38:00. Bitcoin is about one percent of the world's broad money. It has not replaced the dollar. Yet every central bank now has to answer a question it never had to answer: what happens if people leave? The second supply of intelligence does the same to the first. [VERIFY, $1.54T vs ~$150T] - It caps the price, because a subscription can only rise as far as the open alternative allows; the hospital's procurement officer opens a second tab, and the licensed supplier knows she will. It caps the censorship, because a refusal is only a refusal when there is nowhere else to ask; a newsroom in Lagos pastes the document into a model served from nowhere in particular. It caps the capture. The labs can still slow down. Good. What they cannot do here is slow down everyone. - "We don't need to be first. We need to exist." Today's talk is not about can we all compete. It is just: can we compete? Because the need for this competition is profound. - The exit is partial and I have said so: the chips are under export control, the frontier is many times larger, and there is a key. It is still the only exit with no one standing in the doorway. Open weights have a doorkeeper. A lab in another country has a doorkeeper. This has a schedule. - "Bittensor does not make everyone powerful. It makes intelligence something no one can be locked out of." - Then: now the key. ## 22. My own slide from 2024 [VERIFY] **On screen:** Black. White text, Jacob's tweet of 22 Sep 2024, set plain: "The chain operates on a Proof of Authority (PoA) mechanism, with plans to transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) by the end of next year." Beneath, smaller: "Missed. New date: December 2027." **Notes** - 39:00. Now the key. Read the tweet out loud. My words, September 2024. "End of next year" meant the end of 2025. It did not happen. I am not going to pretend it did, and I am not going to wait for the first question to bring it up. [tweet, 22 Sep 2024] - Decentralized means nobody can be sent the letter. How many people have to say yes before you can be switched off? Grade the three layers honestly. Production: decentralized and permissionless, concentrated the way Bitcoin's hashrate is concentrated, and that is acceptable; three pools mine more than half of Bitcoin's blocks and none of them can print a coin. Funding: decentralized by construction; emissions come from the protocol, not a treasury, not a sponsor; this is the layer nobody else has. Control: centralized. One key. - Plainest words in the talk. Blocks are produced by foundation nodes: proof of authority. A privileged key can upgrade or pause the chain. It is a multisig, and it runs through me. "The key is a multi sig but it does have root privs which is dangerous -- ill admit that." [tweet, 22 Sep 2024] In July 2024 we used it to halt the chain in about half an hour during a wallet drain. That saved people money. The same key could be used badly. [JACOB: "thirty-five minutes" only if you remember it; otherwise "about half an hour"] - [JACOB] Some of you were in Templar in April and lost money. Draft says: say sorry here, one sentence. Decide before the talk. - Why it slipped: we rebuilt the economics first, three emission models in sixteen months. I chose to fix what pays before I fixed who governs. Right call then. Wrong call now. - If someone quotes my April essay ("most decentralized AI protocol") against my June essay ("not decentralized like Bitcoin"): both are true. April was about production. June was about control. Do not say "fully decentralized". Ever. - I said in 2024 that "we cannot pretend for a second that at our level of decentralized immutability we are comparable to Bitcoin." [tweet, 19 Jun 2024] Still true. We do not intend to stay behind. Nominated proof of stake, where holders choose who makes blocks, within about a year. On-chain governance, proposed May 2026, three phases, the last one a vote to switch the key off. Full ossification, December 2027: after that nobody, including me, can change the rules. [JACOB TO CONFIRM both dates before either is spoken; the screen says December 2027 and must be changed if the date changes] - Decentralized where the work happens and where the money comes from. Centralized where the rules live. The third has a deadline. - This is the pivot of the whole talk. As long as the key exists, the second world has a switch in it, and the switch is in my hand. I do not get to describe a world with no switch while holding one. "There is one key. It is mine. On the day it is gone, this stops being a promise and becomes a property." - The turn: a centralized lab cannot make this promise. Its key is the product. Ours is a bug we are removing. "The goal of power is to give it away. The art of power is its decentralization." [tweet, 18 Nov 2023] Screenshot this slide. Hold me to it. Do not believe me. ## 23. If you hold. If you build. If you are new. If you are an engineer. [VERIFY] **On screen:** White. Four lines, black: "If you hold." "If you build." "If you are new." "If you are an engineer." **Notes** - 41:30. Ask my own side for discipline before I ask anything of anyone else. Do not chase emissions. Do not dump on the newcomers in this room. "nothing free, nothing given, everything fought for." [tweet, 26 Mar 2026] - If you hold: you hold a fixed share of what this machine pays out, forever, and the right to point it, and no one was handed any of it before block one. [JACOB: confirm before saying] Roughly six hundred thousand TAO, mined after launch, were sold to three funds at about eighteen dollars. Nobody got a token before block one. Say it exactly that way, and say it before a critic does. Stake where the allocation is good. Watch what your validator curates. Hold through the year it takes to remove the key; that is the day the asset becomes what it was designed to be. Wall Street has filed for the ETF and three public companies hold TAO as treasury; say "filed and under review", and do not make it the reason. [VERIFY] - If you build: about a hundred and twenty-eight markets, and there is room for yours. Build for a customer, not for emissions; the fourteen teams buying back their token with customer money are the ones that will still be here in two years. "Don't submit a resume. Submit a model." [tweet, 29 Jan 2024] [VERIFY count] - If you are new: "You don't need no visa to mine a permissionless network." [tweet, 21 Sep 2025] Most of you will only ever use it. That is fine. Most Bitcoin holders never ran a node. The point is that the door is there. "Own Bittensor. Don't come work for Bittensor. Come own Bittensor. Come and be Bittensor." [CT25 ≈22:00] - If you are an engineer, and this is Montreal so many of you are: one team serves a 2.8-trillion-parameter model on eighty gaming cards at about thirty-five percent below the maker's price. Come make it faster. Distributed has to be at least as good as centralized; that is a spec, not a wish. And Pierre is in the room; find him. [VERIFY, Engy] - Three verbs, one each: use, earn, own. Then what the room should feel, in this order: recognition, identity, responsibility. You are the outside. An exit that is not maintained closes. ## 24. Close **On screen:** Black. The same two lines as slide 17, white, nothing else: "Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state." / "Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state." **Notes** - 43:30. The last ninety seconds, word for word. Stay on slide 23 until the cue. About 130 words a minute; the pauses are part of the count. - Here is the whole talk in one minute. - For three hundred years, two things held the most powerful organisation on earth in check. The money could leave. The hands could stop. Every freedom you have was a receipt for one of those two. - The hands are no longer needed. The money can no longer leave. The state and the lab have found each other, and neither of them needs anything from you. Nobody in that building is evil. Every step is called safety. Every step is a switch. Every switch has a hand on it. - You cannot vote your way out of a room you are not needed in. You can only leave it. And Bitcoin taught us the one thing that matters about leaving: the exit is not a place. It has no address. It is a network, with nothing to hit. - So we built one for the mind. It is small. It is not finished. I still hold a key, and I have told you the date it goes. [JACOB: if the date changes on slide 22, it changes here] - But tonight, in sixty-eight data centers in twenty-one countries, on gaming cards and inside sealed chips, a supply of intelligence is running that nobody licensed, nobody directs, and, on the day that key is gone, nobody can switch off. One supply of intelligence in the world with no switch on it. That is the whole job. - Cue: advance to this slide. Wait four seconds. Do not read it. Then say it once, slowly, looking at the room, not the screen. - Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state. - Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state. - Stop. No thank-you. No next slide. Leave this on the screen. --- ## Two objections, two answers Have both ready in the form they appear in `docs/project-context.md`. Each is also seeded in the notes of the slide where it is most likely to surface. 1. **"That is what democracy is for. One person, one vote, and it is more visceral than a token."** (slide 12) Votes have force only when the voter is needed; suffrage followed need historically (Forged Through Fire, slide 5). Democracy is jurisdictional and AI is not. Regulatory capture is democracy's failure mode, and it 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, not capital, and the door is open to anyone. 2. **"Can't we just buy shares in a lab? Same thing."** (slide 12) You cannot; they are private, and the public gets in at IPO as exit liquidity. Shares are permissioned and jurisdictional; TAO is not. Shareholders do not control the machine: Microsoft had put thirteen billion dollars in and held a right to half the profits, and got a phone call about fifteen minutes before the November 2023 post went up; the nonprofit board; the June 2026 switch-off with no shareholder consulted. You cannot earn a share by contributing; you can earn TAO by work. A share of the seller is not a share of the thing. Concede: a fine hedge for the accredited rich; Bittensor is for the eight billion without a term sheet. Never say "Microsoft owned 49 percent" or "learned from a tweet". ## Production notes - Slides marked [VERIFY]: 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23. Re-check every number on 27 September against the "Live values" table in `docs/research/factcheck-slides-v2.md` and against `docs/research/ecosystem-as-empowerment.md` (root share, TAO in subnet pools, live/paying counts). TAO price, Chutes daily volume, Lium GPU count, Bitcoin pool shares, the four-hour arithmetic and the Engy discount move daily or weekly. - Slides marked [JACOB]: 7, 11, 18, 22, 23, 24. See "Placeholders only Jacob can fill" in the header. Nothing marked [JACOB] may be spoken until Jacob has confirmed it. - Slide 4: the Weber sentence is set plain, no quotation marks, because translations differ. - Slide 5: the Forged Through Fire passage is spoken, not shown; it is three sentences. If Jacob wants it on screen, use only the last sentence with "Ferejohn and Rosenbluth, 2016". - Slide 7: confirm the exact Opentensor headcounts (35 and 4), the year, and the entity with Jacob. It is on screen. - Slide 18: confirm on the morning of the 28th that the Teutonic-II dashboard (teutonic.ai) shows a live run. If not, do not say "right now". - Slide 19: confirm the conference running order. The screen says Pierre "Spoke here at 14:00"; change to "Speaks here at 14:00" if Jacob's slot is earlier. Ask Pierre if he is comfortable being pointed at. - Slide 22: Jacob must confirm the December 2027 date and the "within about a year" proof-of-stake target before either is spoken. The date is on screen and in the close. Set the tweet as plain text in the deck typeface, not a screenshot. - Slides 17 and 24 are identical by design: black, two lines, white type, nothing else, no logo, no counter. - Every fictional person (the Montreal developer, the Lagos startup and newsroom, the Nairobi student, the hospital) is a composite. Introduce each with "picture" or "imagine". The three real people on slide 19 are introduced by name and by what they said. - If asked about NeurIPS: "In December 2024 I stood on a stage at NeurIPS in Vancouver and explained how you pay strangers to train a model together." Not "presented", not "our paper". - Lines that are drafted stage lines, not verbatim Jacob, and are therefore not in quotation marks in the notes except where marked: the Bitcoin/Bittensor pair; "Rules over rulers."; "The switch and the steering wheel are the same part."; "Nobody calls it a licence. It is a licence."; "A gift depends on the giver, and every giver has an address."; "It has not happened yet. That is the job."; "Everyone else funds open AI until someone tells them to stop. We built the one that nobody can tell."; "His answer is a stronger nation. Ours is no nation."; "There is one key. It is mine…"; "Every frontier lab on earth has an address…"; "Every freedom was a receipt."; "The exit is not a place. The exit has no address."; "A lab asks its ten biggest customers what to build. We ask anyone who is willing to lose money on the answer."; the whole of the close. - Total on-screen word count is under 200. Keep it there.