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?

We have been covering some of the oldest AI projects that have been quietly building over the last several years and have come to the conclusion that Web3 AI poses some of the biggest opportunities in crypto. Projects like Bittensor, Fetch.AI, and Ocean Protocol are laying the foundational pillars needed in order for developers to come into the blockchain space and develop cutting-edge AI apps and tools. We wonder what the world will look like with a mature AI, with blockchain underpinning its existence and functionality, and what will result from an ethics and values perspective for AI entities. Will society regard them as equal members of civilization who deserve recognition in value determination? We then discuss the Bitcoin Ordinals network developing the BRC20 token standard. This is a tremendous opportunity because the overall market cap is less than 30 million dollars, and the smart contract ecosystem is worth more than 300 BILLION!

Every now and then we stumble across a decentralized technology that is so critical to humanity, its hard to even covey its importance. With the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we’ve seen its massive potential and even potentially destructive outcomes it could lead us to. However, with every great technology, there is a double edged sword. We go deep on what we believe can help decentralize AI and distribute ownership and responsibility to everyone on the planet. Imagine taking the largest computation network known to humanity known as Bitcoin and direct that energy into an AI network where contributors and users of the network own the AI. Here you have Bittensor, a network of decentralized machine learning systems that developers can leverage to utilize an unbiased and verified dataset to train AI machine learning algorithms. Centralized AI counterparts can be corrupted and manipulated by their creators and provide biased outcomes from the AI. Decentralizing ownership and distributing the source of the data provides us without a technical solution to a corrupt AI. Listen to how we break all of this down on episode 152.