# CoinFoin: "Prologue of #Bittensor Documentary | Jacob Robert Steeves, Founder & CEO of Bittensor"

- Title: Prologue of #Bittensor Documentary | Jacob Robert Steeves, Founder & CEO of Bittensor
- Channel: CoinFoin
- Date: 20 May 2024 (published; confirmed from the watch page's date field on 20 Sep 2026). The earlier stub guessed "before February 2026"; the real date is two years earlier, two months before the Decentralized Minds documentary (DOC, July 2024). The file name keeps its "2025" prefix so existing links do not break; the date in this header is the correct one.
- Length: 2:42 (per the caption service, `hasMore: false`).
- URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH55SjDBEZ0&t=18s
- Jacob's start offset: 0:18 (given in the URL; the first 18 seconds are title and music with no captions).
- Method: OBTAINED 20 Sep 2026. kome.ai caption API (`POST https://kome.ai/api/transcript`, body `{"video_id": <url>, "format": true}`), which returned YouTube's English auto-caption track. Timestamps estimated by word position (430 words over about 2:20 of speech, about 3 words a second; Jacob talks fast here) and marked "≈". Expect an error of up to about 10 seconds. There is one music break in the middle (≈1:10) that the captions mark as `[Music]`; the estimate allows a few seconds for it. No audio was obtained.
- Text: verbatim YouTube auto-captions, fillers kept. This caption track has no punctuation, so sentence breaks and capital letters were added for readability; no word was changed except these corrections of obvious caption errors: "bit tensor" / "bit tenser" → Bittensor; "buzzom" → bosom (heard; "we are like the bosom, we're like the womb for AI"); "Commodities" → commodities; one bleeped word restored as [expletive]. "through incent—" at ≈1:08 is cut off by the music break in the source, not by this transcript.
- Format: a monologue to camera, no interviewer audible. The video description says the prologue "features exclusive interviews with the founder and CEO"; only Jacob is heard. CoinFoin's channel has no later "full documentary" that could be found; the Decentralized Minds film (DOC) is a different production.

## Transcript

Only Jacob speaks.

*[0:00–0:18] Title card and music. No speech.*

**[≈0:18] JACOB:** You can understand Bittensor really well by thinking it like thinking of as a corporation. It's not a corporation, but people can understand it that way. It's like a company. It's like Google maybe. But it's also a nation state, because there's a democracy inside of it, and it uh has a has an election process and it has a voting process, and people can control aspects of it. There is not just complete top-down ownership. And that's um what we built when we came to America, and over the last thousand years in Europe we built systems that we could co-own, and that was that power was in check.

**[≈0:55] JACOB:** It's that type of organization, or an organism, that there are no boundaries. It's permissionless. There's no HR department. You don't need a resume. You can come, you can own it, you can use it, you can control it, you can build it, you can contribute to it, um, through incent—

*[≈1:10] (music break)*

**[≈1:14] JACOB:** So the where the rubber hits the road is where money is created. And we focus on that: aligning this organism through monetary incentives, so that we can collectively, as an organism, create artificial intelligence inside of ourselves. We are like the bosom, we're like the womb for AI, um, that all of humanity can own.

**[≈1:33] JACOB:** Okay, what does that actually mean? It means that we use digital currencies to build mining networks that produce digital commodities relevant for the production of machine intelligence. We make AI, because it is a computational problem, using compute that is incentivized into an existence rather than purchased.

**[≈1:50] JACOB:** And then why do we do that? Because if we can build, if we can directly measure the things that we want accurately, we can get them cheaper and more efficient than if we just tried to buy them outright, not knowing what we needed. So it is um a language for expressing exactly the things, the digital commodities, that we need for the production of artificial intelligence, um, inside of an open ownership nation state organism corporation. That's Bittensor.

**[≈2:16] JACOB:** Like, we want everyone to come and work with us. You know, come join, come be. I like to say come be on our board of directors, um, which means you hold the keys to this thing and you can own it, you can viscerally control it and participate. That's my goal, is to make that thing. And it's huge, and it grows every day, and it's [expletive] powerful. Sorry for that. But yeah, that's that's like Bittensor.

*[≈2:42 end]*

## Notes

- This is the earliest recording in the set after TDS (2022) and TBR (2023), and the shortest complete statement of the whole idea: what Bittensor is (company, nation state, organism), why money ("where the rubber hits the road is where money is created"), what it makes (digital commodities for intelligence), why that beats buying ("incentivized into an existence rather than purchased"), and the invitation ("come be on our board of directors").
- "A nation state because there's a democracy inside of it" and "what we built when we came to America, and over the last thousand years in Europe we built systems that we could co-own, and... that power was in check" is the only place on tape where he grounds Bittensor in constitutional history. It is the same move the thesis makes in steps 1 and 2 (the checks on the monopoly on violence), made by Jacob himself, in 2024.
- "Come be on our board of directors... you hold the keys to this thing" is the 2024 version of "Come own Bittensor. Come and be Bittensor" (CT25, 2025).
- "The womb for AI that all of humanity can own" is a new metaphor family (birth, body) for the ownership idea.