**Welcome back to episode 279 of The Block Runner Podcast. As always, we have your host William talking with your cohost I-man as we discuss cryptocurrency developments while we make this new technology relatable to you. You can watch the full episode on YouTube AND stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter at TheBlockRunner.com.
Here are some of the topics they discuss today:**
First up, revisit Bitcoin DeFi through the lens of this cycle’s emerging “industry cook”: digital-asset treasury companies.
Next, Do we really need native Bitcoin primitives, or will off-chain/custodial routes—UTXO time-locks and loan products be enough to make BTC productive?
and Finally, we pressure-test trench metas like Pokémon “phygital” and map where the music could stop.
Alright, let’s listen in!
We break down our recent HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT where we discuss our project MetaZone raising 3 Million dollars in a seed round. This is very exciting for us as we’ve been building in the metaverse space for more than 3 years. All the hard work is paying off and we are now able to take our platform to the next stage to expand the application ecosystem of the 3D virtual realm. MetaZone is an app store where creators can upload 3D functional content that enables buyers to purchase the content as NFTs, and then deploy them directly onto land in the metaverse. Once deployed, users can interact with the content directly and experience the creations for all the beauty and utility they can offer. YouTube and crypto are our passions, but contributing to the metaverse with our project is one as well. We thank everyone who supports us and joins our community as we continue to develop and expand.
We recap the interview we recently had with the co-founder of Bitensor, Jacob Steeves. The main profound statements from the interview include alignment theory between AI and humans through the use of cryptocurrencies. Also, the realization that a decentralized AI system will at one point scale to a massive network that corporate AI will have to participate. Also, we talk about how Sam Altman’s new initiatives with Helios and Worldcoin. Can providing humanity with a universal UBI of a crypto token be what is needed to align all people on earth toward a common goal of economic stability in the wake of human displacement as a result of AI. Are Sam Altman and Sam Bankman Freid alot alike in there views and does that impact the amount of trust society should have in Sam Altman after what happened to SBF? Also, what will it take to catalyze the metaverse in the same way ChatGPT has catalyzed the AI market to emerge, or how netscape onboarded millions of users to the internet? We try to identify what those events will look like for the metaverse.
We spoke with Jacob Robert Steeves who is the founder of Bittensor, a project working to bring artificial intelligence to the blockchain space in hopes of decentralizing ownership and control over the technology. This project has been in development for many years and has an already viable ecosystem with operating nodes, validators, and stakers. The incentive mechanism they have incorporated involved the minting and distribution of TAO tokens which is the reward for participants in the ecosystem. The economics of the token follow Bitcoins exactly in its total supply and emission schedule. This is to ensure the network needed to support and grow Bittensor’s machine learning systems can grow to the scale of what Bitcoin has done. If successful the computational power of Bittensor will be 500 times more of what Google’s entire data infrastructure could provide. Jacob Steeves goes in depth about the philosophies that motivated him and his foundational team to work on this initiative and how the future of AI will look.
We have been deep in the weeds of this Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem growth for a couple of months, and with the recent phenomena of BRC20 tokens. The interest in this ecosystem is growing exponentially, and we want to find every bit of information about how it works, what effects is it causing on Bitcoin, and how far this could go. The current BRC20 mania is causing serious protocol-level disruptions to the Bitcoin network. How the community decides to react to this dilemma will decide the future for Bitcoin and whether or not it will evolve past just a store of value vehicle. On top of this, how will this have an effect on the metaverse if at all? Why is development for the metaverse so difficult and what methods might possibly be introduced to bring the kind of liquidity the BRC20 space is experiencing to the metaverse sector?
We start by discussing a recent conference called consensys and how the industry sentiment is improving especially around the metaverse. Then we go over the details of AI danger and how the godfather of AI who received a Turing award has decided to sound the alarm bells against the dangers of allowing AI development to continue without regulation. What are the actual dangers and how bad will it get? How does web3 solve this potential problem and how long will it take for AI to be as ubiquitously adopted as the Internet ? How does Bittensor fit into this timeline and ultimately, how much value will the TAO network output when in its fully mature state? We then cross into the Bitcoin realm and discuss the continued growth of the Ordinals ecosystem as BRC20 market is accelerating at an exponential pace. How does this compare to the early days of Ethereum, and if the infrastructure is built needed to make BRC20s a viable fungible token standard, how will the two ecosystems compare. Can the BRC20 market one day become a multi-billion dollar industry the way Ethereum ERC20 market has?