The Bittensor standard
towards p2p computational capitalism
"There is a very similar pattern that you find in the structure of societies, in the structure of companies, and in the structure of computers, and all three are moving in the same direction, that is, away from a top-down structure of a central command system, giving the system instructions on how to behave, towards a system that is parallel, that is flat, which is a web, in which change moves from the bottom up. this is going to happen across all institutions and technical devices, it's the way they work." - Nick Land, 1994
The evolution of AI follows a similar trajectory. From early algorithms created entirely top-down, human knowledge directly encoded into the system, pre-defining the solution. To today’s deep learning algorithms like language models where humans only define the objective function and let the computer search an abstract space of possible configurations, discovering the model bottom-up through iteratively adapting parameters towards the gradient of the objective. Bottom-up evolving the model towards desired capability, ushering the modern paradigm of machine learning.
The field evolved from initially defining the key, to now only defining the lock and letting the computer find the key.
Throwing energy against a constraint structure without constraining its assembly to fit the constraint, over time approximates the optimal configuration. It is a matter of adaptive search.
This draws an analogy to a principle of nature. The world around us can be viewed as an emergent adaptation to a thermodynamic constraint, multiscale evolving towards energy gradients of its environment. Constraints set the landscape, energy gradients the trajectory through it.
Designing our algorithms by this principle has been the core fundamental to the era of machine learning and paradigm shifts, like transformers, were driven by optimizing this adaptive process, leaving increasingly more space for pattern capture and novelty to bottom up emerge from the computer. transformer’s special sauce is contextually adaptive neural connectivity.
We can find this pattern fractally across nature. From physics, chemistry and biology to computers all the way up to linguistics, cultures and economies. Its interscale evolution and fundamentally inescapable, solely a matter of adept navigation.
Self-organization in distributed systems
Nature is inherently distributed, adaptive and parallel. Order in complex systems emerges decentrally through a web of bottom-up interactions organizing around local constraints, propagating contextual signals and successful adaptive configurations openly scale-free across the system. Emerging a decentralized collective intelligence ordering chaos into coherence. Evolution’s innate gravity towards synergy driving local assembly into cooperations, recursively creating levels of hierarchical structure, each evolving the level below to their constraints following local energy gradients, multiscale aligning adaptive trajectories towards higher order organism functioning and fitness. Emerging increasingly complex levels of organization in fractal evolution, from cells to companies.
This equally describes capitalism, there are deep similarities to market economics. There are countless parallels to nature. For instance, slime mold, a classic distributed intelligence, allocates resources similarly to capital markets. Excessively diverting energy from older pathways to frontiers in search of utility, maximizing reward from its environment.
Markets are deeply natural and inherently decentralized mechanisms, like an emergent nervous and vascular system of civilization. Though central banks and other top-down institutions have corrupted our means of representation, distorting the signal our distributed intelligence depends upon for coordination.
There is much to ramble about, but let’s get to the plot. In reflection of the great utility applying this adaptive bottom-up search principle to algorithm design brought us, it is intriguing to consider what applying it to economic design, whose incentives subordinate algorithm design, could yield.
In other words, making economic incentives openly programmable on computers to adaptively search their configuration space for utility. Since markets are inherently distributed, depend on networks and common forms of representation, a protocol makes sense. Its substrate maximally native to the nature of a market. Meaning distributed, permissionless and bottom-up adaptive.
Thus, we have to look into the realm of distributed and programmable digital currency.
Bitcoin as a p2p market system for hashes
Turns out, the largest amount of computation parallelized towards a common objective today by an order of magnitude is Bitcoin, coordinated by distributed programmatic incentives. Bitcoin's unprecedented qualities as a market system driving the production of hashes are obscured, as they hold no intrinsic value, only abstractly in the security of the ledger.
By reaching consensus on a clearly defined methodology to programmatically distribute resources as an untainted reward signal for desired output, with unconstrained competition and innovation, massively parallelized, Bitcoin created the most efficient and antifragile market system known to man.
Only final output counts, anyone can compete by any means around the globe fully adaptive to their local circumstances, unconstrained local assembly of top-down central coordination, dynamically divisioning the with scale surging organizational complexity across many concurrently competing sub-collectives nested in coherence of consensus, currency and aligned incentives. Harnessing human ingenuity, competitiveness and globally stranded resources freely. Maverick but competent individuals, misfit in traditional structures, can thrive and express their energy potential.
Emerging companies building specialized hardware, lobbying, marketing and miners arbitraging energy costs, bureaucracy and cheap, stranded compute around the globe. Driving efficiency of hash production up and cost down, by deeply adapting processes to the physical world. Which is the market function scaling material progress into societies.
BTC price cycles stimulate hash-market expansion and resilience, by oscillating between exploration and pruning.
The magic happens in Bitcoin as a fungible digital currency, it interoperates the virtual protocol economy with the outside world through a shared container for monetary energy. That combined with the programmability of inflation distribution inside adversarially robust consensus is the foundation for p2p programmable incentives.
For the growth flywheel to function the incentives need to connect miners and holders in circular value flows, for Bitcoin it’s computationally insured permissionless scarce immutable p2p currency.
The purity of natural market principles respected in Bitcoin’s self-securing design paired with its ability to directly apply speculative liquidity towards its objective in a looped circuit, is what enabled it to reach its mind-blowing computational scales, out of reach for any government.
Bitcoin’s incentive mechanism is an artwork of resource coordination the artist set to unfold by itself indefinitely. Satoshi defined a self-perpetuating adaptive trajectory evolving the world against the objective of computing hashes to secure Bitcoin. The art is the market.
In the category of organizational structures, Bitcoin is something new, something abstracted that can nest other organizations below, parallelizing them in coherence, synchronized under a central heart-beat, aligning incentives programmatically towards a shared objective. An economic machine learning model, bottom-up adapting the physical world towards its objective function.
Yet Bitcoin is only a static type of programmable incentive configuration, not built to dynamically adapt itself, but everything around it. Just potently beginning to tap into the vast possibility space of its paradigm.
But to explore this space adaptively, like training a neural network, it first needs to be generalized into a unified framework open for exploration, an abstraction over Bitcoin’s incentive mechanism that can coherently nest many configurations beneath in concurrent evolution, making objectives freely programmable in circular value flows with protocol stake.
For true generality, the only feasible circular design is giving Stake control over weighting the distribution of block rewards between peers. Enabling them to create their own incentive mechanisms locally adapted to their needs. Sounds good however, ultimate subjectivity is flawed, as the most short-term profitable strategy for Stake is to simply reward itself in isolation, a snake eating its own tail. Making individually rational behavior the contrary of collectively rational behavior.
We are lacking a consensus to enforce agreement on reward distribution between Stakeholders to create global incentive alignment. Yet the more space for adaptation, the more useful configurations are possible. Similar to how transformer’s success fundamentally builds on enhancing adaptive space. So it is a core design principle to constrain local space to adapt minimally.
Yuma Consensus
Bittensor, the trailblazer of this field, answered with Yuma Consensus. Designed for massively scalable dynamic intersubjective agreement in adversarial climate, a fuzzy consensus to determine probabilistic truth purely from a set of weights and stake. Translating local weights into the global chain weights.
YC assumes an honest Stake majority and a potentially dishonest minority, while dynamically stabilizing Stakeholder incentives in a robust game-theoretic equilibrium.
Consensus-weight is calculated by determining the highest weight supported by at least the Stake majority, meaning it assigned either equal or higher weight. Any weights set above the consensus-weight are automatically down-corrected to consensus, while minority lower weights are effectively ignored. Disallowing any minority attempt of manipulating miner incentives.
The honest majority equilibrium’s robustness is guaranteed through a consensus-based reward proportional to Stake. The deeper in-consensus, the more reward. The weaker consensus, the higher the reward for strengthening consensus, while out-of-consensus weights come at increasing cost. Creating guarantees of honesty being the optimal strategy for majority stake. Upholding market-wide Stake coherence by making global alignment the local self-interest of Stakeholders.
The high-level idea of YC is to flexibly enforce majority agreement before translating local weights into the global chain weights, incentives. While neutralizing manipulation attempts and guaranteeing alignment to the majority is individually optimal, in a dynamically stable equilibrium.
By constraint to a unifying consensus, Bittensor makes the stake-weights-reward distribution circuit game-theoretically viable. Laying the foundations for generalized, permissionless, economically scalable peer-to-peer programmable incentives.
Since Yuma Consensus runs purely on a set of weights and stake, it becomes fully agnostic to both what is being measured, and the methodology applied for it. Only the final numeric weight distribution is passed onchain, stored as a weight matrix, separating all computations involved in its calculation from the protocol. Granting Validators unconstrained adaptation to local circumstances. Thus, any set of programming languages and computing systems can be applied in modularity for building incentive landscapes, substrate agnostic.
While the protocol is permissionless, Incentive builders are free to locally enforce permissions, compliance measures like KYC/KYB or even contractual agreements for participation, essential to capture legacy business.
Through living at the edge of order and chaos, Yuma became the first adversarially robust yet fully substrate-agnostic consensus mechanism. A vital innovation ushering a golden age of unified incentive space exploration.
Bittensor’s market anatomy
Bittensor is a p2p economic computer designed to coherently run incentive applications in massive parallelism, looped in a self-adaptive circuit, continuously reconfiguring its energy gradients to adapt the physical world to its objectives and its objectives to Stakeholders.
Stake as open-to-join vested interest, a permissionless ownership monetary energy container interoperating the computable protocol economy with the outside world. Representing ownership over incentives and what they emerge or more abstractly share in the present ability and future potential of the computer to find high utility equilibrium between incentive builders and incentive miners.
Both adaptively searching a match between their configuration spaces evolving in duality against constraints of the other side, aligning their adaptive trajectories towards convergence, parallelly adapting to the meta constraints of the physical world, in coherence of shared monetary container and consensus.
The economic model exhibits multiscale isomorphism to machine learning, a co-evolution between incentive builders and incentive miners, resembling model architecture and neural optimizer, searching a complex space for dually coherent high utility configurations.
The abstract market dynamic is a circular game between mining Stake in an objective function by measurably approximating it and Stake searching for utility in objective function configuration space.
Emergent on top a game of applying the resulting output effectively to the physical world, forming competing offchain organizations conducting business development, acting as real-world extensions of the protocol.
The Torus describes the higher order dynamic of the system well, a continuous adaptive flow folding into itself while rewiring its trajectory. Similar to an evolving neural network.
The circular flow anchored to Stake enables a fluid transformation of speculative liquidity into native energy for the TAO economy, dissipated through protocol incentive landscapes. Speculation on the objective of an incentive mechanism is transmuted into monetary energy gradients, fueling the adaptive assembly of configurations converging with the constraint of the objective. Speculative energy on Bittensor’s future is diverted effectively to fuel its realization, resembling the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy in its inner function.
Market of markets
When running many subnets of incentive configurations in parallel, something needs to determine emission distribution between them, driving competition. Bittensor created a root subnet, where Stake currently manually assigns weights, modulated by an older variant of YC. A higher instance of consensus weighting the emission flows across YC instances nested below.
While miners compete around subnet emissions, subnets compete around protocol emissions.
Creating a market of markets, pricing the intersubjective value each subnet has to Stakeholders, while subnets price the value each miner has to its objective. On whatever basis Stake prices, creates the energy gradient subnet developers will adapt towards.
dynamic TAO proposal
This mechanism lacks dynamism, has oligopolistic tendencies and is vulnerable to cronyism and collusion. It works well enough for now, but mechanism innovations are actively being conceptualized, led by the ‘dynamic TAO’ proposal. It deserves and will have its own whitepaper, but the high-level idea is making subnets tradable denominated in TAO, allowing an open dynamic market to price their emissions.
This makes the process of subnet price discovery open to everyone, not just operators of large Validators, while creating vast profit opportunities in applying accurate prediction and information asymmetry to the price. This should decentralize and vastly increase the amount of intelligence poured into figuring out the appropriate emissions for Bittensor’s individual incentive configurations.
One of the promises of efficient, collusion resistant subnet pricing is expansion beyond Yuma Consensus, allowing subnets to innovate outside its constraints.
Prediction markets as coordination tools
Running on only a set of weights without assumptions, Yuma Consensus is recursively composable. Weights can weigh weights, enabling hierarchical layers of prediction, each determining probabilistic liquid truth evolving a layer of parallelized YCs below. Allowing to break the multiscale complexity of a pricing problem down into layers. Stake is global, participating at every level simultaneously.
Whenever the metaorganisms need to coordinate itself grows, new instances of Yuma with optionally novel incentive structures can be spawned to continuously produce probabilistic prediction around a constraint, a liquid truth available as modular component across the protocol. Stake-weighted is just the original archetype of Yuma Consensus but can be arbitrarily replaced by e.g. reputation mechanisms, making weight in consensus something to be earned through for example historically accurate prediction, not bought. So adaptations of YC can be applied from the mining side, not limited to Stake.
Emissions can be allocated to structure incentives around YC prediction. For instance, Bittensor has time-averaged bonds validators attain in miner’s they weigh, making part of weighting a medium-term directional prediction on a miner’s weight.
We can expect new types of bonds to emerge over time, potentially in tandem with custom scoring and reputation mechanisms, as a response to a need of focusing areas of prediction on certain aspects, aligning the collective focus on certain time-horizons or simply increasing adaptability to new information.
Producing evaluations or predictions that are composably available to the protocol is not limited to YC, there can be prediction subnets of any format. Opening up on the fly adaptive emergence of distinct specialization in producing signals for subdimensions of the meta coordination.
an emergent techno-capital organism adaptively evolving senses with market intelligence to measure and coordinate its own expanding complexity.
Open Opportunity
Another subtle but significant feature of Bittensor is the decoupling of Stake ownership and access to development/business opportunity. Stake can freely delegate to accepting Validators, giving them control over Stake weight and access bandwidth, allowing them to utilize and participate in Bittensor on Stakeholder’s behalf. Validators take a currently hard-coded 18% cut on Stake dividends accrued from setting weights.
Meaning anybody with a compelling plan can get bootstrapped, funded and granted access-bandwidth by delegators, by advertising to them competitively. Generally speaking, they would transform subnet outputs into higher subjective value or simply profit, while providing competitive value distribution back to delegators.
Delegator is anyone not running their own Validator, which requires unique infrastructure needs per subnet with frequent not always smooth updates as validation and mining co-evolve. Hence most Stakeholders choose to delegate, defaulting into a conscious decision of what groups and initiatives represented by individual validators, they want to amplify in the protocol economy.
Delegation is liquid and can be freely adapted any block, allowing fast feedback loops between a delegation’s expectation and reality. Loosening Stake liquidity in the protocol considerably, with a constant gravitational pull towards highest subjective value-creating utilization and highest dividends through good weighting, stimulating multiscale pricing efficiency and utilization while keeping value flows and final control anchored to Stakeholders.
The same principle applies to subnets. Anyone able to raise or acquire currently 1000 TAO to lock, amount shifting based on demand, can launch a subnet and start developing an incentive configuration, competing around root subnet weight, judged by Stake.
Subnet operators are responsible for creating an incentive landscape aligning miners efficiently towards their objective, an ongoing and usually rigorous R&D effort in the open, incentivized through an 18% cut in emissions the root subnet allocates. Possibly a significant sum of continuous liquid income.
Allowing anyone the opportunity to build a company or career around or within Bittensor. Stake is just the final controller and beneficiary, but does not constrain contribution, only its evolutionary constraints.
Letting change move from the bottom up, open access to opportunity through competition, not just in Bittensor’s mining markets but in building incentive mechanisms, turning their outputs into products or whatever people come up with. Anyone can accelerate the ascension upward Bittensor’s meta adaptive trajectory and get directly rewarded with ownership and control. Competency, talent and effort can quickly rise to influential positions and get flooded with funding, yet devalued in days when results degrade.
Incentive engineering
Incentive engineering is hard, especially in permissionless thus adversarial climate. You are trying to synthesize a coherent collective output, by wielding a volatile interplay of web-scale loose human ingenuity and competitiveness at your fingertips. With currently $50m+ a month of liquid rewards distributed to miners across subnets, proportionally changing with price.
Formally defining the objective is not enough, you need an adversarially robust autonomous pricing methodology scoring the relative value of miners continuously. Pricing deterministically measurable digital commodities like raw compute is straightforward, but when dealing with something probabilistic in nature like machine intelligence, any miscalibrations and inefficiencies can quickly blow up in your face. There are talented and well-capitalized teams lurking from the shadows picking apart the OpenSource code and models in search of profitable exploits.
Yuma Consensus aligns Stakeholder incentives, but aligning miner incentives is an ongoing challenge unique to every subnet. While innovation is transferable and can compound across them, every subnet needs to invent a tailored algorithmic game-theory aligning miner incentives towards its objective.
The holy grail is an incentive landscape where everybody maximally acting in local self-interest culminates in swarm behavior maximally acting in global interest of the objective, or in other words minimizing the tension between locally rational and globally rational behavior, maximizing synergy. Pricing value not purely on an individual level, but in context of the whole.
peer to peer intelligence markets
This ideal is especially compelling in the realm of AI, Bittensor started off as a p2p market system for intelligence prior to generalizing into subnets. Intelligence makes a great example to zoom into some emergent dynamics of permissionless incentive markets.
Only the final output is measured without assumptions on its origin, leaving full space for creative ways of locally optimizing performance and cost. If that means using a fine-tuned OpenAI API, an overseas call center replying to requests manually, applying a secret AI breakthrough or all simultaneously is for the free market to decide.
Every new OpenSource model release, technique, paper or even closed-source API is a potential arbitrage opportunity inside the subnets incentive landscape. Depending on miner efficiency, it takes only a few days until a useful OpenSource release is applied by the majority. Innovation is constantly sucked into, refined and adapted to the subnets objective, because the edge is immediately liquid by achieving better relative validation scoring with lower costs, instantly felt in profitability. With scale, this kind of system could become an industry-standard benchmark used to evaluate a model’s performance versus what according to market forces is the real state of the art.
Since technically market actors are just anonymous endpoints generating outputs, an AI lab sitting on major private innovations unable to publicize could still directly monetize in fit subnets while maintaining secrecy. Outputs can be filtered for sensitive information locally. Making such subnets, similar to financial markets, likely one of the first places to show indications of major AI advancements long before they become public.
Validation itself can be a modular stack of AI systems that can backpropagate gradients for miners to actively train on. The enormous continuous amounts of outputs, synthetic data, generated across miners can be used to build datasets to distill models from the aggregate intelligence and serve them back to the subnet recursively refining intelligence.
Validators can implement a sparse Mixture of Experts, learning a routing model of miners, building a map of contextual capability to route requests to the best experts or coalitions of them.
Every miner is an endpoint, and every endpoint can theoretically nest infinitely more endpoints behind it, that can each do the same. Allowing offchain optimized model swarms, communicating with Bittensor through a local routing layer. Sharing information and optimizing as a collective that can scale mining slots fluidly with bandwidth. The possible levels of sophistication, hence market efficiency, are unpredictable.
Market composability
One subnet’s output could be the other’s input. Specialized subnets for compute, storage, data scraping, data curation, training, RLHF, and inference all working in unison, allowing the protocol to organize like departments of a bigtech corporation, but massively parallelized under bottom-up permeable hierarchies. There are no bounds on composability and emergence.
Small subnets specializing in helping or complementing larger subnets in some way might emerge. The system can dynamically complement itself on the fly. Subnets are by necessity OpenSource and developed in the radical open, OS resilience multiplied by incentives, unintentionally running massive bounties to discover vulnerabilities.
There is an unstoppable innovation arbitrage between subnet builders, in their nature as market systems developing open mechanisms in production. Evolutionary progress compounds quickly across the protocol driven by market forces. Any successful adaptive configurations proving antifragility to a subnet’s mining market over time can be forked with confidence as modular components into validation of other subnets. Could be a novel game-theoretic aspect, a single classifier or the whole stack. Invention spreads virally.
If a subnet builder starts off well and gains market share, but then can’t scale or sustain sensible validation, anyone could fork attempting takeover by convincing the root market of their ability to carry forward, as miners follow emissions. This radically free OpenSource competition accelerates evolution and therefore search through incentive configuration space.
High-dimensional markets
Digital commodities are native to Bittensor’s digital markets. Machine intelligence has many contextual dimensions of value out of bounds with legacy marketplace price discovery.
Markets are essential as a medium to coordinate distributed production of commodities, every action leaves a trace of information guiding actors in their local context and stimulates subsequent action, an effect called stigmergy or the invisible hand of the market. Dynamically divisioning work and guiding local resource management into global bottom-up emergent order pulling towards equilibrium. Emerging an autocatalytic global flow driving the collective forward on aligned trajectory, without direct communication or awareness of existence between actors.
So for distributed production efficiency of intelligence as a commodity, the market needs to act as a medium for stigmergy, the feedback loop velocity sets coordination tickrate. Autonomous pricing provides a continuously available wire for stigmergic communication, vital for distributed training markets and many other configurations. And compellingly, to capture contextual and semantic nuances of intelligence in pricing, you need autonomous intelligence itself. Neural pricing for the neural element. Pricing methodology = market’s objective function.
It seems like the natural evolution of technology, neural markets underlying the neural commodity. The market actively learning itself. The multiscale isomorphisms between Bittensor’s anatomy and machine learning systems make it intuitive, even Yuma Consensus is similar to neural networks inherently probabilistic and adaptive.
YC as market alignment tool
With scale, Bittensor’s incentives become increasingly influential to the larger trajectory of humanity and purely demand-adhering, unstoppable cyber markets could have detrimental rippling effects on society. So an important property of Yuma Consensus is protocol morality always aligns to Stake majority. As long as immoral motives are in minority, they cannot express themselves at all. Which secures Bittensor against immoral generative content and other minority issues, Stakeholders decentrally moderate protocol outputs. Their financial incentive is aligning Bittensor with the moral majority of society. Aligning AI from first principles, the incentives of the markets driving its creation. An ideal in demand of constant attention and energy by Stakeholders.
Computational Capitalism
Modern civilization is plagued by coordination quagmires, the multifaceted complexity of our activities and coordination problems for maintaining civilizational stability are outgrowing money in its current form as a method of value representation and memory model to structure monetary incentives. Money forces to collapse high-dimensional value into a one-dimensional representation whose information is further compromised as a powerful tradeoff for fungibility, failing to capture the exploding nuance of economic and societal context. Money is a pre-information age technology. That it’s also corrupted by parasitic institutions does not help. Malfunctioning profit incentives and game-theoretic dilemmas are becoming progressively more pervasive to our collective functioning and well-being. Western medicine or the military industrial complex are the most ubiquitous examples.
Technological evolution is driving humanity towards contextually adaptive more granular forms of value representation, that can measure reality as a computational model able to represent an arbitrary amount of measurement dimensionality. Semantic money, or neural money, a wider fuzzy notion that will take many forms.
Markets can encode more information into money, so money can encode more information into markets. It’s the transformer moment for capitalism, contextual sensitivity. It should have the potential to enable formation of novel individual and collective paths to value, a complete repricing of human activity capturing deeper social and contextual nuances suddenly opening many paths of valuable coordination previously out of bounds with the lossy value compression of money. Humanity stepping the second foot into the information age.
This is a predictable but likely generational societal shift that could bring potentially major systemic turbulences as powers of current economic paradigm painfully fight adaptive pressure or attempt a top-down controlled transition into a more granular representation paradigm ultimately still controlled by their structures, like CBDCs, marginally captivating and distorting our bottom-up emergent self-organization likely similarly leading to coordination dilemmas.
Cryptography, distributed ledgers and AI are the substrate for the technologically pure implementation of this shift to emerge from, and probably we should be in a rush.
Digital currency allows us to already today fluidly bridge parts of our fiat currency based economy into a computable environment to structure profit incentives around arbitrarily complex contextually sensitive scoring mechanisms, memory models and globally adaptively optimized game-theoretic configurations, starting with digital commodities.
Allowing this new paradigm of coordination mechanisms to symbiotically coexist and evolve with present structures, exchanging energy through fiat trading pairs of the coin, functioning as a computable extension of capitalism. Enabling at least technologically a smooth transition towards full embracement of distributed computational economics.
Humanity is in a complexity crisis, a constant race between exploding complexity and our competency mechanisms trying to keep up, while themselves expanding their complexity. Clearly, we are currently lagging behind, which could eventually cascade into the collapse of globalized systems. Hence Bittensor’s promise of computational markets with hyper-dimensional pricing and algorithmic game-theory is big, a leap toward a more information-centric society.
The platform for distributed incentive computing is here, now it’s up to the market to discover revolutionary configurations on top, a rigorous evolutionary process. The bet is desired solutions are within the possibility space, and it’s merely a matter of adaptive search and scale.
By the state of current incentive configurations, imagining that one day this framework might solve immensely complex and nuanced market coordination problems seems utopian, but so did the idea of intelligent conversation partners to be discovered within the configuration space of neural networks before mega-scale multi-year adaptive search.
Fundamentally Bittensor is a thermodynamic system, capturing and dissipating free energy in search of maximum entropy producing co-adaptations between itself and the physical world, minimizing energy potentials, establishing flows with external energy gradients, accumulating energy into its body to maintain order amidst expanding complexity, indefinitely perpetuating its exploratory adaptive trajectory, anchored to Stake.
It is impossible to predict how the system has reconfigured itself or what outcomes it serves 5-10 years from now, impossible to predict the volume of global human-capital-machine resources under its control. While as of writing this admin keys to the chain are still in control of a centralized multisig inside the OpenTensor Foundation, once renounced the system is free to scale towards being virtually unstoppable, similar to Bitcoin.
Anyone inside of it is replaceable, everything is a market. Hierarchies are bottom-up permeable, anyone moving in misalignment to the larger flow and objectives is quickly replaced. Yet collectively, Stake is in control, inextricably tethering Stakeholders to the meta-organism. It is hard to predict where its markets will reach, but theoretically, anything resource-seeking measurable by computers coupled to an identifier can be reached by its incentives.
It is a matter of infrastructure to enable incentive programming around tangible commodities, physical labor and processes. Chainlink's hybrid smart contracts and oracle systems, IoT sensor networks and legal automation are promising leaps towards scaling Bittensor beyond digital commodities.
Obviously there is immense complexity and novel challenges across domains associated with all those things, yet to be figured out. But the market engine continuously propelling capital times human ingenuity towards it is running and only growing in volume and efficiency. There is no reason for pessimism and every reason for optimism.
Right now we are still in the early stages of the protocol and infant stages of the paradigm, but on a strong trajectory towards ushering a new era of all-out computational capitalism. Augmenting the old economic paradigm to enter the age of computers, in order to overcome the turbulences and complexity of the 21st century.
want to chat? reach me on X @Timo37_