# The Crypto Rabbit Hole: "The Art of Disruption: Bittensor and the New Intelligence Economy"

- Title: The Art of Disruption: Bittensor and the New Intelligence Economy
- Channel: The Crypto Rabbit Hole (host CH Egan; produced with Media3.ai; shot at Proof of Talk 2025, the Louvre, Paris)
- Date: published 23 September 2025 (filmed June 2025)
- Length: 1:14:26
- URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDNBQ52M8k&t=76s
- Jacob's start offset: 1:16 (given). Jacob's segment runs 1:16 to 7:34. The rest of the film is other people.
- Method: YouTube blocked from this VM. Caption text read from a rendered copy of the public watch page, which also carried the chapter list. Timestamps inside Jacob's segment are estimated from position and marked "≈".
- Format: research transcript. Host paraphrased; Jacob's key lines quoted verbatim.
- Speakers: HOST = CH Egan; JACOB = Jacob Steeves.

## Chapters (from the video)

00:00 Intro · 01:16 Jacob Steeves · 07:34 Ala Shaabana · 12:24 Joseph Jacks · 17:46 James Altucher · 27:26 Siam Kidd · 40:17 Jose Rios · 48:42 Micaela Bazo · 56:04 Ken Miyachi · 57:07 Ben James · 01:03:25 Rob Greer

## Jacob's segment, 1:16 to 7:34

≈1:16 HOST introduces "the founder of Bittensor, or should I say the Opentensor Foundation?" and asks for a short intro.

≈1:30 JACOB: "I've been building Bittensor since 2015. And that's what I do to this day." He has just launched a subnet: "Now I'm a subnet owner. Buy my subnet, I'm just kidding." He is trying to build something unique and compete with other subnet developers. Then a sharp turn: "I actually feel like Bitcoin is more important than TAO. I know that's weird to say. But I would die for Bitcoin over TAO." Reason: "we need that shield." He was challenged about needing his own coin on a CoinDesk call: "thank God for Bitcoin maximalists. The toxicity is what keeps us all safe." Background: Google, DARPA, "military grade tech."

≈2:50 HOST: what was the aha moment after Bitcoin's success?

≈3:00 JACOB: the man who explained Bitcoin to him was his previous boss, who built brain chips that trained models with pure electricity, "thermodynamic computing," what Beff Jezos does now at Extropic, "but we were doing that back in 2015." The epiphany: think of computing as energy flow, like a river or the brain. Then: "humanity's most developed abstraction for energy is money." A revolution in money and a revolution in computing pointed at "this unification." Original inspiration: "bringing natural-style computing with cryptocurrency in order to facilitate computation at that scale." He left the DARPA contract and "did that ever since."

≈4:30 HOST: where is the world in five to ten years; how does Bittensor affect humankind?

≈4:40 JACOB: "I think that we're going to create the most powerful artificial intelligence there is." Intelligence as "an element... a digital commodity." Build up "the layers of digital commodities all the way until we get to this top one." Today: compute, storage, inference, training, moving "higher up this filtration system towards more refined elements." Bittensor will be known "as the creator of intelligence and something that they can own." Then a self-imposed deadline: "if we're not really competing with OpenAI, with our stack that we're building in about five years, I think that we would have failed."

≈5:50 HOST: how does nature play out in technology?

≈6:00 JACOB inverts Clarke's law: "a sufficiently advanced technology is not distinguishable from nature." "what we're building is natural technology." Against the survival-of-the-fittest obsession: in a working ecosystem it is "the survival of the most collaborative and the most productive and the most interconnected that really survive." That shapes how you build: make Bittensor connected rather than antagonistic. Without those experiences he might have built an aggressive, competitor-attacking philosophy. Closing line of the segment: he has tried "to imbue the lessons that I learned from the jungle and from plant medicine into everything, not just my technology." (Note: project rule says the jungle and plant-medicine origin stays out of the Montreal talk.)

≈7:20 HOST thanks him: "Mr. Jacob Steeves, @const himself."

## Rest of the film (not Jacob; summarised only)

7:34 Ala Shaabana (co-founder): academic background, met Jacob in 2019, chain launched 2021; Bittensor sits at the nexus of open-source AI and incentives; the community's drive comes from frustration with a "classist" AI world. 12:24 Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital) on open source and ownership. 17:46 James Altucher on internet → Bitcoin → Bittensor as networks of information, wealth, and intelligence. 27:26 onward: investors and subnet builders (Siam Kidd, Jose Rios, Micaela Bazo, Ken Miyachi, Ben James, Rob Greer) on their subnets and why they are "all in."

## Jacob's stage-worthy lines (verbatim, auto-caption source)

- "I would die for Bitcoin over TAO." (≈2:00)
- "The toxicity is what keeps us all safe." (≈2:30)
- "humanity's most developed abstraction for energy is money." (≈3:40)
- "if we're not really competing with OpenAI, with our stack that we're building in about five years, I think that we would have failed." (≈5:40)
- "a sufficiently advanced technology is not distinguishable from nature." (≈6:10)
- "the survival of the most collaborative and the most productive and the most interconnected that really survive." (≈6:30)