# Unshackled Living: "Jacob Steeves on Bitcoin Culture, Decentralization, and Bittensor's Revolutionary Impact"

- Title: Jacob Steeves on Bitcoin Culture, Decentralization, and Bittensor's Revolutionary Impact
- Channel: Unshackled Living (host is a UBC professor, recorded in Vancouver)
- Date: 14 January 2025
- Length: 52:08 (podcast audio)
- URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I5vWguO3_0&t=2495s
- Jacob's start offset: 41:35 (given). That is the passage on why he lives in Peru: cities, the Cantillon effect, and remote work. Jacob speaks from 0:10.
- Method: YouTube blocked from this VM. The show's podcast RSS feed (Anchor) carries the same episode; the audio was downloaded and transcribed locally with faster-whisper `medium`. Timestamps are from the podcast audio, accurate to a few seconds.
- Format: research transcript. Host paraphrased; Jacob's key lines quoted verbatim. This is the most personal of the 16 and the only one where he tells the founding story at length.
- Speakers: HOST; JACOB = Jacob Steeves.
- Project rule: the ayahuasca section (43:20 to 50:40) stays out of the Montreal talk. It is summarised, not quoted.

## Outline with timestamps

0:03 HOST: how did you get into crypto? JACOB: studied maths and computing at SFU; "it was pretty obvious to me at the end of my degree that the problem that would be the bottleneck to solve for doing artificial intelligence was going to be computation." 2015.

1:23 JACOB found Alex Nugent on Wikipedia, who built neuromorphic chips from memristors. Explains memristors as synapse-like components and the von Neumann bottleneck: "the brain, the state of the brain is in the brain at any particular time." (This confirms the project-context question: the "GNOME" company is Knowm, Alex Nugent.)

2:43 The job story: "I called him up and I was like, I want a job." Nugent set a test, an article on the AI toolkits of 2015, "and he paid me a Bitcoin." He accepted Bitcoin "because I wanted the job." A friend held 150 BTC worth $50k and Jacob told him to sell: "It's funny how things are in hindsight."

3:58 Nugent ran the DARPA SyNAPSE program. On conspiracy theories: "No, I was literally just an intern for a company that was contracting with DARPA."

5:14 "you actually need somebody to teach you Bitcoin. It is not easy to understand." He used to think mining was "crunching prime numbers."

5:50 Decentral, Vancouver: "the coolest crypto hack space in the world," an underground room behind a hidden black door, "doge images everywhere," the Pirate Party and the Rhinoceros Party. On authentic communities: "they're not a stereotype. You can't just be like, oh, they're left-wing, they're right-wing."

7:49 The Bitcoin conversion passage. "Bitcoin is not just a technology, it's not just a way of making money, it is a way of seeing all of human history... through the lens of economic insecurity and our inability to be free from dictators and tyrants." "we have entered a new age of humanity where we're free to transact without a middleman." He compares Bitcoin's founding to "almost a Jesus-like moment": an anonymous founder, a whitepaper, early followers. "I went down and I never really left."

9:08 The 2015 schisms: Bitcoin maximalists, "Ethereum kids," and the Doge crew, "an absurd weird amorphous memetic vibe," with "meme shaman" talks. "they're really rich, you know, because that adds this level of credibility to everything."

12:00 HOST: how does that lead to Bittensor? JACOB: he learned the jargon "in a very visceral way because we debated it all... why is a pre-mine bad? What does decentralization really mean? Who is the enemy that we're fighting?"

13:04 The first click: "I started to look at Bitcoin as a supercomputer." "how is it defending itself against the United States government? How is it going to become nuke proof?" "we should try to use this type of computational primitive to solve other problems."

14:20 The second click, from the memristor work: "nature abhors a gradient of energy." "We're just like thermodynamic machines that try to consume energy so that we can maintain our structure." Then: "what's humanity's most abstract form of energy is money. So... we can do computation with money as well as electricity."

15:39 The third click: Ethereum showed "you could actually start building." His boss "sensed that I was sort of not really interested... and he actually fired me, or I quit, or it just ended." Early 2016: "I am going to do Bitcoin mining for AI."

16:59 HOST: what is Bittensor, simply? JACOB: "I knew nothing... I was not a seasoned engineer." Went to Google after giving up for a while. The decomposition: "The miners do stuff. And then there's some validation of the work that they do. And then there's a reward mechanism." Why ML is hard to validate: hashes and signatures are binary; ML values are "very high dimensional," "probabilistic and fuzzy and maybe pseudo random." "we invented another consensus mechanism... we call it Yuma consensus." "I was playing around with IPv6. I was trying to train machine learning models off Raspberry Pis at Decentral... I was just tinkering for years and years and years." Then: "Ethereum took the contractual side of Bitcoin and expanded the language and built EVM. We looked at the computational side of Bitcoin and said, let's expand that side of things."

22:05 On DePIN: "a term that was invented only a couple years ago, so it's new to me." "Filecoin is just one thing on Bittensor." HOST: so a layer one, and Filecoin would be an app on it? JACOB: "Yeah, exactly." 64 subnets at the time, "just like a limit we have," to "constrain the complexity of the design and also learn the art."

24:37 HOST asks about the token, noting legal limits. JACOB: "I don't know what those are." In 2021 the lawyers "basically said like, you know, don't do it. It's illegal... And we said we're going to do it anyways because we believe in what we're doing. We didn't do a pre-mine. And that was also a bad idea. They told us that we should do a pre-mine. That was more legal."

25:53 The pre-mine passage. VCs "will always attempt to extract the most amount of money they can of the project early." "they'll try to give you more money so they can take more of your company." Then the founders "have to pre-mint the tokens... and all of those go to insiders." "they use you as exit liquidity." "I think it's extremely toxic."

28:26 Honest account of the early funding: "We needed some funding. Now if I could go back in time, I probably wouldn't have accepted almost any of that funding." "if you're a good engineer with modern technology, you can write the whole thing." Give the token "to the people that... do the work, hopefully as some sort of proof of work, not an airdrop, because the airdrops, you just give it to people. They don't care. But if people mine your protocol, they care." "you're kind of building like a nation state." "a lot of founders destroy their projects just by raising too much money." "It's way better to be right up against the anti-fragile movement of the price... a taxi driver knows if the price is going up." How they protected the launch: "we'll only sell the tokens that we can mine in the future. So we'll mine and then we'll sell them to you later, but only after we mine them." (This matches the project-context correction on the OTC sales to Firstmark, DCG and Polychain: mined first, sold after.)

31:40 On giving ownership away: "You discover that there's all of these amazing people with great qualities that as a collective are so strong and so much better than what you can just be." "You're not as good as your community, right?" "there's nothing more powerful than like a really large aligned group of people." "I'm kind of like a CEO-ish founder. I'm an important person, but I'm not the only person. Like we're a collective of like a hundred CEOs."

32:50 HOST: what does a $4 billion market cap feel like? JACOB: "I actually never thought more than like exactly what I was doing at that moment in time." "if you start imagining what you could be or something you'll get demoralized." "anything great is just continuous work." "it is surreal but it's also just exactly the same."

34:20 HOST: when did you know it would work? JACOB tells the story of the failed prompting network: "we spent like six months basically failing this to the point where there was sort of a massive blow up in the community because one person just took the entire network over." "this person was just better than us... and called our bullshit." He defended the attacker: "the mistake was with us, the mechanism designers. When you build games, if the game is toxic, it's like the mechanism designer's... fault. Humans are all fucked up, right? And if you put them into a really bad game like Risk or something, we all turn into assholes. But if you play a really good game... people love each other." He went "undercover in my own Discord" under another name and concluded: "these guys at the Opentensor Foundation really fucking suck... which is funny because I was them." The eureka: "why are we the ones doing this? We should let other people do this. We should make it so everybody can do this." They opened the protocol; "the network just exploded." The lesson: "you're not that special. You're not that smart. The thing that's smarter than you is the game, that it just attracts more smart people to it."

38:43 "the person who can experiment the fastest is the one that wins." "what you should be thinking about is the meta-mechanism that will allow you to actually select the mechanisms."

40:05 HOST: why Peru and not Dubai or the Caymans? JACOB (41:35 is inside this passage): "We don't all need to be in cities and we only went to cities because of like factories and the industrial revolution. And then we stayed because of centralization." "if we want to make a lot of money, you got to go to New York... because of the Cantillon effect... You got to get closer to the money printer." "we live in a world where it's protocol-based and the money is all coming from Bitcoin, which is everywhere. And so we don't need to live in cities and we can go to the extremities of the world." "it's actually way better to live in a small town with a community of people that you all know, and that you have an effect over, that you can contribute to. That's where humans are actually from." "Cities are like an aberration." "forced into factories, which have become corporations. But we don't need to live like that anymore, like remote work, baby." "remote work will be more efficient than working in an office."

42:45 On the global south and the dollar: "we actually impoverish a lot of the world as a consequence of... our privilege at being at the center of the financial world." "if we're unduly rich, it's because somebody else is unduly poor."

43:20–50:40 Ayahuasca. He explains it as a mathematician-atheist would, using the analogy of the visible spectrum and shamans trained to perceive more. Summarised only; excluded from the talk by project rule.

50:40 HOST wraps. JACOB: follow @const_reborn, join the Discord, bittensor.com.

## Jacob's stage-worthy lines (verbatim, Whisper medium)

- "Bitcoin is not just a technology, it's not just a way of making money, it is a way of seeing all of human history." (7:49)
- "we have entered a new age of humanity where we're free to transact without a middleman." (8:10)
- "I started to look at Bitcoin as a supercomputer." (13:10)
- "We're just like thermodynamic machines that try to consume energy so that we can maintain our structure." (14:35)
- "what's humanity's most abstract form of energy is money." (14:55)
- "Ethereum took the contractual side of Bitcoin and expanded the language... We looked at the computational side of Bitcoin and said, let's expand that side of things." (21:30)
- "They told us that we should do a pre-mine. That was more legal." (25:45)
- "they use you as exit liquidity." (28:00)
- "if people mine your protocol, they care." (29:05)
- "You're not as good as your community, right?" (32:05)
- "we're a collective of like a hundred CEOs." (32:40)
- "anything great is just continuous work." (33:50)
- "if the game is toxic, it's like the mechanism designer's... fault." (36:15)
- "you're not that special. You're not that smart. The thing that's smarter than you is the game." (38:10)
- "You got to get closer to the money printer." (40:55)
- "we don't need to live in cities and we can go to the extremities of the world." (41:20)
- "if we're unduly rich, it's because somebody else is unduly poor." (43:05)