Headline: Bittensor co-founder says Bitcoin’s network outstrips top supercomputers — and that same model can power decentralized AI
At the Proof of Talk summit in Paris, Ala Shaabana — co-founder of Bittensor and partner at Crucible Labs — painted a striking picture of how computing power is shifting away from siloed corporate data centers to open, global networks.
“We all know that Bitcoin really dwarfs the top 100 supercomputers,” Shaabana told the audience. “Does anybody know, in comparison, what the hash rate is? It's over 600,000 times the power of really what these supercomputers can do. And that's just, really, it's Bitcoin.” He used that comparison to illustrate how decentralized incentive systems can marshal enormous amounts of hardware and coordination.
Shaabana’s vehicle for that vision is Bittensor, a Layer 1 protocol that intentionally mirrors Bitcoin’s economic design: a 21 million token hard cap, scheduled halvings, no pre-mine and no venture-capital distribution. But instead of rewarding miners for solving cryptographic hash puzzles, Bittensor rewards participants for running and validating artificial intelligence workloads. The network issues TAO tokens to miners who meet performance objectives, effectively redirecting the incentives that made Bitcoin a global computing force toward AI.
Bittensor organizes that effort into 128 distinct “subnets,” each a specialized problem-solving neighborhood with its own goals. “Show me the subnet, and I’ll tell you what the miners are optimizing for,” Shaabana said, riffing on a classic market aphorism. The point: incentive design determines behavior. Reward raw compute power and participants optimize for speed; reward storage and they optimize for storage capacity. Programmatic goals attract talent and hardware aligned to those goals without a central corporate gatekeeper.
For Shaabana, the implication is more than technical. He argued the fundamental bull case for decentralized networks is increasingly economic and sociopolitical — driven by macro factors like debt, liquidity, and declining trust in traditional institutions. “Subnets really create markets. Intelligence really is no longer locked behind issues of organization; signals will define the truth, and performance is really rewarded,” he said.
Whether Bittensor’s approach can scale into mainstream AI infrastructure remains an open question, but Shaabana’s framing highlights a broader shift: if coordination and economic incentives could turn Bitcoin into a staggering compute engine, the same blueprint could be repurposed to mobilize global AI resources — potentially reshaping who controls the future of intelligence.
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