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Mark Jeffery Bittensor Fund Podcast #187
Recorded: April 4, 2026 Duration: 1:42:54Space Recording
Full Transcription
In the Thor chain ecosystem or not even in the Thor chain ecosystem just random people we love we pull them off the street
We don't care. We love chat with people. This guy got up early just to join our live stream
So that is really awesome. You guys know what we're gonna do right now
Let's get this intro out of the way for those who don't know Thor chain is the world's leading Bitcoin decks
You can swap Bitcoin with 10 different blockchains across 40 different pools without using bridges or wrap tokens. Check it out at swap.thorchain.org. Swap.thorchain.org.
Anyone in the world can use Thorchain. There is no account to open, no KYC required, and privacy
is a human right. Thorchain has two tokens, RUNE and T-C-Y Y the fees for swapping on Thor chain are paid and rune and
That's where the yield comes from the fees are deducted from the swap
So you do not need to own room to trade on Thor chain
That's pretty freaking cool. You guys 10% of the protocols revenue goes to T C
Y token holders remember to stake the T C Y tokens in order to collect that yield essential
There are no inflationary block rewards
on thor chain therefore the yield is real money paid by real users and rune is also deflationary
as five percent of the revenue is burned thor chain is a full layer one with the ability to
create smart contracts on it similar to ethereum this app layer is being developed by rogera if you
need help guys with thor chain in general join in general, join the ThorChain community
discord and telegram group. Links are for at ThorChain.org, ThorChain.org. Please follow
ThorChain on Facebook and Instagram and ThorChain contact, all one word, on TikTok. We need 1,000
followers to live stream on those platforms. And always remember, you guys, this podcast is for
informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial investment or legal advice and with that out of
the way guys let me introduce myself my name's denny i go by patriot sounds i do also help with
runebon.com i love thor chain but doing it for over half a decade now i feel like an old man
i am an old man i'm getting older but i'm never gonna stop this is the space to be i love it i'm
gonna go ahead and kick it to my main man, Kenton, for an update,
and then we're going to get right into it, guys.
How's it going, Kenton?
I'm good, man. Always never as energetic as you.
You might feel old, but you have the vitality of a young man.
Just the cocaine, bro. Just the cocaine and bath salts.
Literally in the morning for that.
Things are going good.
I'm just trying to take a
like a little bit of update for you guys um i'm hoping to have our website done friday april 17th
that's um talking to the devs and the seo people hopefully that all looks like that can we can make
that happen um um and i did have i thought i had something oh the the swap interface so just
reminder guys we added some new features there um billyetta custom memo uh the bond and um
staking unstaking everything for tcy um so they're they're live but it's still in beta so don't you
know if you're gonna do anything do a test amount know, don't do large funds, make sure it works first. You know, we're still, we need to test it in a live environment. But that's coming along. And one of the things that we've been working on the last few weeks here with Randy, our new BD guy, is looking into getting Tau, towel pool on thor chain and um forgive me mark i don't
know how it actually came up but someone's like well we should get mark on the podcast
and you get a pool and and you agreed and you're here it's like this is awesome this is exciting
and this is yes this really is community run we had community members are like why don't we have
a towel pull we need to get tab and get going it's not on any dexes it's only on centralized exchanges
we need to get on door chain mark's a big towel guy and you're correct me if i'm wrong but you're
a fan of thor chain as well oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah so i'd love to get into that but but
first just me before we dive into it all, just give us a quick intro.
You know, I mean, you're a real OG in tech and crypto.
So I don't want to, if you can introduce yourself a little bit,
maybe some of our audience aren't familiar with you.
Yeah.
Some of your background and what got you here to this point.
Yeah, no worries.
And yeah, I'm kind of old.
So, you know know i was there
again i didn't mean to call you old that's okay because it's true so all good all good um yeah i
mean basically yeah i've been kicking around doing startups since like the mid 90s uh my first one
was something called the palace it was like this metaverse thing, but 2d, um,
it got to 10 million users at its peak. Uh,
it was funded by SoftBank Intel and Time Warner. Uh,
we sold that in 99 to another company. And then, um,
I did a, I did a, a.com company in 99 through like 2000. Um,
and it got crunched and it was called super SIG. Yeah. I basically got,
you know i sailed
out on my surfboard right in the middle of the worst wave ever right it was basically that the
story of that one palace was great that one was not uh but after that a friend of mine named
travis kalanick invited me to come work for him at his second company red swoosh he would later go
on to found uber right so that's how you might know that name um so i worked with him for about
a year and a half uh you know just me and a couple guys I worked with him for about a year and a half, just me and a couple guys in a small room
for about a year and a half or so.
And then I left, oh yeah, right.
Then I founded a business social network called Zero Degrees
in 2002, sold that in 2004 to Barry Diller Interactive Corp.
And it had about 1 million users when LinkedIn had 2 million.
So it was like within shooting distance when we sold
it people like well why didn't you raise money for it and the reason why was because after the dot-com
boom and bust nobody could raise money for anything it was just even reed hoffman could
not raise money for LinkedIn and then after we got acquired by um uh by barry diller we delayed
his funding by another year because all the vcs in the valley were like reed why would i fund your
dumb company when barry dillard's is going to come along and crush you?
Right?
Like that was literally the response that he got.
He told us later on.
So did that, stayed at IAC for a little bit.
And then I got interested in podcasting and I podcast a novel and that was like a whole other adventure.
And then Jason Kalkanis called me up and said,
hey, I got a term sheet from Sequoia.
You want to be CTO of this new company I'm forming called Mahalo?
And so I did that with him for about four years.
And then together, and then Elon Musk was on the board of that company.
So, you know, we had like Sequoia people and Elon Musk rolling around the office,
you know, on a regular basis.
It was pretty cool.
It's kind of like Warhol's loft, right?
And back in the day.
And then I founded a company with Jason called This Week In. And This Week In was basically the foundation
that This Week In Startups was built on, his
personal big show. And then that same infrastructure was then used on the
All In pod, right? Because he already had already had that running right so that seed kind of produced a lot of things um i went on to get
into crypto i was in bitcoin in 2013 um wrote a couple books about it because i had that novel
writing background it had been published by harper collins so i was like oh i'm a guy who can write
and i'm an engineer and i understand this thing that I think is super important. So in 2013, I wrote my first Bitcoin book and then I wrote another one in 2015.
And then I started podcasting once again and I interviewed Vitalik a couple of weeks before
the Ethereum ICO, along with about a hundred other things that are no longer around.
So it was like one of a whole bunch of stuff.
And so I got in on the Ethereum ICO.
So that was sort of my second whole bunch of stuff. And so I got in on the Ethereum ICO.
So that was sort of my second nice win in the crypto space.
DeFi Summer was here for that, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And fast forward to today, I am now partner of something called Stilcore Capital, which is a liquid venture slash hedge fund investing exclusively in the BitTensor ecosystem into Tau subnets.
And I'm doing a podcast called Hashrate, which is covering that entire ecosystem.
Wow.
Dude, that's amazing.
I told you.
It's a long story.
No, that is great.
It's awesome.
So, like, I mean, I actually have a bunch of questions.
What was it? I mean, you're have a bunch of questions. What was it?
I mean, you're obviously Bitcoin early.
What was it about Bitcoin that you're like, wow, there's something here.
This is huge.
This is a big deal.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, so like I said, I did this weekend company with Jason, right?
Jason Kalkanis.
In 2011, well, before that, during the dot-com boom and bust there were several
attempts at digital currencies right so there was the one that sticks out in my mind from that era
was something called flues and it even had whoopi goldberg uh doing commercials on regular tv
and yeah yeah you know this was this was during the dot-com boom and bust right so she would go
on tv and be like,
there's this new virtual currency called Flues, get it,
and then you can spend it on things online, right?
That was literally the pitch, right?
And I remember thinking, and then nobody cared.
Like, it didn't take off.
It was centralized, of course, right?
Because nobody had cracked the double spend problem
and invented Bitcoin yet, so there was no other way to do it yet.
And I remember seeing that in
all the other attempts. And so when Jason had someone on his show on this weekend startups,
that started talking about Bitcoin, I was like, nah, this is like that flu's thing. It's not
going to work. This is dumb. I've seen this before, you know, it's, it's cute, but whatever.
And it just didn't penetrate my brain that they'd cracked, you know, decentralized spending and the double spend problem. Right.
Like that kind of detail did not come up or, or, or it did.
And I just don't remember, but I remember thinking it was like flus and who
cares. Uh, Barry Silbert watched that same show and famously became a billionaire
after that sort of turning them onto Bitcoin. Right. So, so Barry got it right.
I got it wrong. Uh. Jason got it wrong too.
And basically that guy left
and neither one of us bought Bitcoin, right?
By 2013, however, I had two friends,
a guy named Michael Turpin and another guy named Brock Pierce,
who would later go on to found Tether
and a bunch of other things, or co-found Tether,
he wasn't the only founder.
But basically those two guys were part of sort
of the LA cabal of people doing interesting internet things in the late 90s here in LA.
And there weren't very many of us. So there was like maybe, I don't know, 200 of us
building companies and doing things. And we all knew each other, right? So I saw Michael Turpin
and Brock get extremely, extremely excited about Bitcoin, almost like they were looking at the Internet for the first time again, right?
Because when the Internet was new, a lot of people didn't believe that that was going to be the thing that would be the final form of the Internet, right?
A lot of people thought AOL.
That was the final.
Like, how are you going to defeat AOL?
Are you insane? They own everything. That was the final. Like, why are you, how are you going to defeat AOL? Are you insane?
They own everything.
Like, that was the vibe, right?
And it looked impossible.
It looked like you could never dethrone AOL, right?
And people would be like, well, this internet thing is really ratty.
It's got no user interface, really.
It's hard to get online.
It's hard.
You have to, like, get a, there were all these pieces
you had to sort of self-assemble in order to get online.
And AOL was just a highly produced consumer ready online-ish thing, right?
And so people were like, well, that's the highly produced Disneyland of online.
So obviously that's going to continue to win.
And, and Bitcoin was sort of, it sort
of had the same vibe, right? It was very sort of rough around the edges. The wallets were pretty
crappy back in like 2013 or so. Um, to get it, you had to go to Mount Gox. Like there was no other
way to get it. There was no Coinbase yet, right? You literally had to sign up for this thing in
Japan that also sold Mount, you know, you know, Magic the Gathering cards.
Yeah.
Right.
It was like, it was really, I didn't get to wire your money to Japan and like wait,
and like wait a week for it to settle, right?
Because it's going across borders and hope it just didn't vanish because you didn't
really know it.
So the whole thing looked pretty sketchy, right?
And that was how I bought my first Bitcoin was on Mount Gox.
And there was no other way to do it.
But anyway, so basically
Brock and Turpin got very excited about this thing and they're both extremely different
humans. And so when I saw them sort of triangulating on this thing with this like intensity that
I'd rarely seen out of them, I was like, okay, I better have another look at this. And so
I did and I just, I was sort of i and i had this experience where i was kind of like well that's too simple
it must break if you just sort of do this and then i'd be like oh that actually no it doesn't
break actually and i sort of worked it out i said well what about this and basically i did this thing
where i like poked it from all these different angles and surprisingly it didn't just fall apart
right and and the and the more I dug into it and then
I started putting my engineer hat on I'm like okay so how does this thing work under the covers
and um so I put my engineer hat on I started digging around and basically I got it on my
head and I was like holy f-balls right like this is this is like a very significant thing and and
I and I had you know always been a fan of sort of you know I'd been listening to Ron
Paul at this point right so I knew how the Federal Reserve worked and before and before like 2009 or
2008 or so it's really the 2008 crisis that made me start thinking about this stuff like how does
money work right like I didn't really pay any attention to it I didn't really care it's like
I don't know it works whatever right I'm interested computer stuff. I don't care about that as long as it doesn't fall apart.
But once I sort of got that in my brain, I was like, that's really pretty sketchy
the way it actually works when you dig under the hood.
It's the way the Federal Reserve works and how we got taken off the
gold standard, all that stuff.
The creature from Juckle Island. Yeah, right.
All that stuff was bouncing around in my head, and it was fairly new at this point, right?
Like it was all new thoughts.
And when I ran into Bitcoin, I was like, oh, this looks like the cure to those problems, right?
And plus, it's got all these other digital things that make it highly superior to gold and other things, got pretty excited. And I'm like, well, if this is like a reboot of gold
or even national currency,
this might be bigger than the internet,
or might be as big as the internet, right?
And when I was a kid,
the PC revolution happened in my house.
My dad was an engineer.
So I saw like the very early, very early TRS-80s
and things like that.
Like I was using them as a kid, right? So, and when I grew up, I saw like the very early, very early TRS-80s and things like that.
Like I was using them as a kid, right?
So and when I grew up, I was like, oh, I missed the PC revolution.
There'll never be something as big as that in my lifetime, right?
And then the internet came along and I was like, well, this won't be as big as that,
but it might be something, right? That was literally what I thought, right?
And it turned out it was much, much, much, much larger.
So when I saw Bitcoin, I was like, oh, this might actually be bigger than the Internet.
That was sort of where my brain started going.
And I was like, well, I must be insane because I don't hear anybody else really saying something like that.
And then Mark Andreessen in a New York Times article said almost exactly the same thing I was thinking.
And I was like, oh, OK, I'm not insane.
Andreessen is looking at this thinking much the same thing I was thinking. And I was like, oh, okay, I'm not insane. And Dreesen is looking at this thinking much the same thing, right?
So that's when I started to get confidence in my conviction, I guess.
And pretty much by 2013, I was locked and loaded, right?
I was like, okay, this is extremely, extremely important.
So that's how I got conviction on it.
Dude, that's great.
And so I'm glad for you that background because you got conviction on it. Dude, that's great.
So I'm glad for you that background because you've seen a lot.
You've been through a lot.
You've seen what works, what doesn't work in crypto and not.
So that's 2013.
You're falling into space since then.
I mean, you've written two books.
You're deep into it, interviewingik you know pre pre ethereum
ico so like you're in the weeds fast forward now up several years you hear about door chain you hear
about uh tau walk us through that process how you came across both and, you know, what stood out for them that got you interested?
Yeah. So for me, Thor chain was something that I didn't pay a lot of attention to originally,
mostly because it's called a Thor chain, right? So I was like, oh, it's another EVM thing. Who
cares? Yeah. I thought it was like EVM flavor of the month, you know, but it had a cult around it
for whatever reason that was, you know, not discernible to me at that time.
That was my initial impression.
I did not yet get that it was a cross-chain, basically a cross-chain DEX that was fully decentralized.
Once I understood it, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool.
And the party trick of being able to go from raw native Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain into whatever is one hell of a party trick right and nothing else really does that right not it's and not certainly not at scale and um you know
the only because the only other option is to use a centralized exchange which i'm forced to do by
the way right now with tau right because there is no way there's anytime I want to convert my Bitcoin into Tau, which I am doing, I have to go to a centralized exchange.
There's no other path to get Tau.
Change my Bitcoin into Tau, there's no other way to do it.
But once I sort of shoveled, I can't remember exactly what made me do it, but I started digging around ThorChain.
what made me do it, but I started digging around ThorChain.
And once I got that the liquidity pools basically straddle two chains
and everything gets translated into Rune in the middle,
I was like, oh, that's a really cool design.
And I'd not seen anybody else do anything like that.
And I'm like, oh, this is much better.
And I'm like, oh, this is much better.
It's not a bridge.
There's other people who think it's a bridge.
There's other people who think it's a bridge.
And I'm like, and the distinction of cross-chain decks,
fully decentralized versus bridge thing, is a very big one.
And when I was coming up the learning curve on ThorChain,
we'd already seen a bunch of these hacks, right?
And it felt like there was a new hack every week, right?
I think the, I don't know, I'm spacing the name of it.
The guys who did the gaming, Axiom Infinity.
Axiom Infinity.
Yeah, Ronan, the Ronan hack.
Yeah.
When I was learning about ThorChain, the Ronan hack had like just happened or something.
It was right around that time.
And it felt like in that moment, there was like a fresh thing every week that was making everyone depressed.
A fresh hack, right?
And it was mostly a bridge hack.
And so ThorChain not having any bridges, but being this sort of really clever cross-chain DEX thing,
I was like, oh, this is like, it's not vulnerable in the same way, right?
And as far as I can tell, don't see a vulnerability that that compares to
something like a bridge right so um so anyway long story short i became a fan at that point
i was like oh this is i haven't seen anything better and they're really thor chain is one of
those things where as far as there's people who've cloned it but there's nobody that's created a
competing clever mousetrap that does more or less the same thing even to this day right and i think what
what thor chain has booted up is pretty unique um and and and probably hard to copy because sort of
you know you're getting it up to scale at this point um you know it's sort of like it it's sort
of like trying to copy bitcoin like you could do it but you you're not going to copy the enthusiasm
that people have for bitcoin right because that's there's already a lot of people that have the brand in their head and believe in it, right?
And it was fairly launched.
That's extremely hard to do.
Like the fair launch of Bitcoin is incredibly, incredibly important.
And it's a big part of why people believe it has value, right?
Because I think at the end of the day, there's nothing with intrinsic value.
Like, let's be honest.
Like, money does not have intrinsic value.
Gold does not have intrinsic value.
Stocks don't have intrinsic value.
Real estate doesn't.
Bitcoin doesn't.
It's just how many people believe.
How many people are clapping for that fairy, right?
Really?
That's the reason.
It's human belief that imbues something with value right and so but
there's reasons why you imbue something with value you imbue tesla stock with value because
you believe that elon musk is gonna keep coughing up things like optimus right and you know you
that's the that belief is what powers the valuation of the stock.
So I think in Bitcoin's case, the reason for belief is extremely good, the fair launch.
And you have to, the founder basically has to be not greedy and patient, which are, you know, you need like a four-year boot up period, more or less, before it sort of starts going somewhere.
And for a lot of people, and also they might not have a lot of ownership, right? Like, like Satoshi himself only owns 5% of Bitcoin,
right? How many, you know, there are a lot of founders that have owned like 30%, 60%, right?
Like it's, it's the numbers are quite larger, right? But for most cap tables and founders,
right? So, and, and going to, and going to BitTensor, BitTensor, there's no entity that controls more than 2% of it.
So it also was fairly launched like Bitcoin and also had a four-year boot-up period that lasted until basically, I'd say, end of last year.
This is sort of when BitTensor really started to get wind in its sails and take off.
There were people talking about it, but it wasn't like it is today. And I think Bitcoin had a similar sort of boot up period, right?
Where even the founder is forced to mine it, right?
The founder gets no coins unless they mine it.
And that, you know, compared to something like Solana, which is, you know, it's VC coin, right?
Where like, you know, all these VCs own a big chunk of it and can, you know,
and once their
lockup periods are over can dump on the market at any time and you know we're talking 40 60 percent
of of ownership right something like that um and the coins are pre-minted it's just it's a much
like it feels bad right to the new entrance like this to look at the cap tail which is like well
geez it's like this thing's already played out. All the big people already own, and they're just waiting for the price to come up, and they're going to dump.
So why would I invest in this when that danger, you know, there's basically this avalanche that's just waiting to happen at some point.
Why would I build my house there?
I should probably build somewhere else, right, just because I don't like the theory that that avalanche might come and get me, right?
So I think Bitcoin successfully, it's very welcoming to new people because it's fair, right?
It doesn't feel like the avalanche is going to happen.
It feels like, oh, okay, this is solid ground.
I can build my house here.
And I feel, and BitTensor has basically did the same thing.
And I think there's very few things which have succeeded at that.
So, yeah.
Before we, actually, if you don't mind, I want to stay on ThorChain for a few more minutes.
We're forgetting that in the towel.
I really appreciate what you said about, you know, how unique ThorChain is.
And no one's really come along and done anything similar.
And even if you fork it or have forked it, it's hard. You can't fork a community, you can't fork
capital, you can't fork a brand, you can only fork the code. You can't fork the network effects.
And actually, you talked about earlier what held you back on Bitcoin. That was for me, that was one of my turning points of Bitcoin
was wrapping my head around the network effects.
And that, because I was like, you can just create another Bitcoin
and copy and paste, like make Kenton coin.
Like this is dumb, right?
It has no intrinsic value.
But the value is the network, the network effects.
That's the value, that subjective value you're talking about.
And that, for me, that was a light bulb moment and and on bitcoin and for me on
thort chain this is what keeps me here and keeps me bullish and excited is store chain has the
network effects and when it first came out it was novel it was. But now we're four years later
and there's still, like you said,
really nothing competing.
There's other exchanges,
other platforms do cross-chain,
but they all have some element of centralization
which introduces censorship,
which is everything we're trying to move away from.
That's the whole,
the subjective value in crypto is permissionless, no censorship.
And after four years, DoorChain is still really the only cross-chain platform that is decentralized.
It doesn't center.
So when I think about it like that, I'm like, it's actually in a way more valuable today than when it first came out because there's it's truly truly still truly unique um so i'm really glad
that you you reckon i'm not crazy that you you see that too yeah no you're not crazy it's a key
i think door chain is a very key piece of infrastructure for all of crypto and i think
a lot of people don't understand that yet, but I think they will.
But yeah. Well, I want to get into that too. Okay. Why don't you think people get that? Like why?
I mean, we're all the same, right? We all judge a book by its cover. You know, I see things that
this is dumb and maybe it takes me a year or two to figure it out. You know, you admitted to it as
well. I'm sure all our audience we all do that
eventually you came around on stuff what do you think it's going to take for the the crypto market to come around and understand thor chain and well actually this isn't what i thought it was but this
is huge this is important and um you know what do you think it'll take i mean my guess is that it
needs a new front door of some kind.
Because remember, you guys call it Thor Chain, right?
So that makes me think it's a chain, right?
And it's not a chain, it's a cross-chain Dex, right?
But you say Thor Chain, I start thinking, oh, okay, it's like Nier.
It's got like, there's probably a Dex on it somewhere.
There's probably lending on it.
There's probably real-world assets on it, right? It's
probably got a bunch of little apps and it's got its own little community. It's like, we're going
to be the biggest chain ever. And everyone's going to, banks are going to use this, right?
Like, that's what I think when I hear chain, right? So I think the branding is just off because it
doesn't say, it doesn't say cross-chain decks on the front door, right? And I think, I think it
could be solved by just coming up with another brand
that's like the front door i think it's a very simple cross-chain dex front end of some sort
and you know call it like cross-chain i don't know what you want to call it but call it freya
or call it odin or i don't know something you know go with the north same if you want right
yeah but but somehow like basically all those people that have bitcoin
out there like the earth's largest liquidity pool right you could be the gateway for that to enter
everything else right this is the the gateway to valhalla right and you've got you know at its peak
to 2.5 trillion where the bitcoin out there that can move through thor chain and get on to other
things a lot of bitcoiners don't like to move,
except at the height of the market where they all start thinking that they're
smarter than everybody and they'll sell now and catch the next wave on the alt
coins. It happens every time. So it will happen.
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
Right? Like it's going to happen when Bitcoin zips up the 200 K or whatever,
everyone will start rotating into something else
right and most of them will be wrong but they'll still do it so so anyway so I think I I think
just sort of somehow you know creating a really simple rebranded front end that just says cross
chain decks on it doesn't even talk about like how it works um that that's how you're going to get those people i think okay great noted no thank you but the great feedback um so and i just and
maybe just to kind of go into a bit like like you're not a casual thor chad like you like you
said you participate in liquidity pools did you participate in the uh savers and lending as well? I did participate in lending, yes.
And so apologies to that.
No worries.
But you're legit.
You use ThorChain.
You get it.
So you're not blowing smoke up our ass here.
Well, this is great, Mark.
So I appreciate all that.
I don't know, Denny, if you want to touch on ThorChain anymore before we change subject? Well, this is great, Mark. So I appreciate all that.
I don't know, Denny, if you want to touch on Torchany more before we change subject?
Well, here's the thing.
When it comes to BitTensor, when it comes to Tau, right?
This is something that Chad said back in 2022, I think it was.
I'm just going to talk about XRP for a second.
XRP was labeled security, right?
And then they were delisted.
It was terrible, right? And so XRP had no connection to the DE security, right? And then they were delisted. It was terrible, right?
And so XRP had no connection to the DEX, right?
And so I think what's very important for Tau is we need to give it a rail,
allow accessibility to anyone in the world
that is permissionless, right?
No KYC decentralized.
And so this is something I'm really excited.
I don't want anything to ever happen to someone like yourself, Mark.
You're working with a community.
You have this community that's essentially, they're on an island.
They're isolated.
They're alone.
They have no direct connection.
And so I think it's really important, given not only your history and how influential you are in not only you know just building towel but shaping this
this this intellect um this internet revolution that we exist in it's incredible um you have a
book um you did mention it it's the bitcoin explained book by you is that that correct
yeah bitcoin explained simply yes i just wanted to bring that up real quick because i was just
checking this out and this is free right this is i is, there's no cost. I might have, I might have, I don't remember.
Well, I mean.
It's possible.
Well, here's the thing is like, when people talk, it's like Kenton said,
blowing smoke up someone's ass.
Like, you mean what you say, you know what I mean?
You're here for the revolution.
You're here to change the world.
And I just love how this community, wider crypto blockchain community,
is that we always, there's's some altruistic element to this because we realize how transformational, how important this is that we get people on this blockchain standard that we built.
Uncensurability, permissionless, non-KYC.
Alluding to your previous points, especially 2008, where it's all a big game, right? Where you have, you know,
you have these subprime mortgages,
they get repackaged in these various things
and they're in bed with the rating agencies.
They're getting AAA ratings,
but it was all nonsense.
The whole system crashes and nobody goes to jail.
Like we're done.
We're done with this stupid system.
We're, you know, we're here.
So for those who don't know,
can you explain a little bit,
like what is BitCensor? Like what is Tao? What makes you really excited about it? So I'll kick it back
to you. Yeah. So transitioning over to the BitTensor stuff. So, you know, it's very much
like early Bitcoin where it's like, you know, you ask 10 different people and you get, you know,
15 different answers. But I'll give you sort of my sort of four dummies version.
So instead of a product department in a company,
imagine instead of sort of hiring a bunch of people in your company,
you make a list of tasks.
And AI devs, agents, AI agents, claws, and raw GPU from all over the earth
compete to complete your task the best and the fastest.
And a blockchain, or sorry, a Bitcoin-like blockchain rewards the winners with newly
minted tokens. That, in a nutshell, is BitTensor, right? So the idea is, like, let's make a new
Bitcoin. Let's make something with 21 million only tau, right? Tau
is the coin. So there's 21 million only. It is admitted at exactly the same schedule as Bitcoin,
right? So it's 2013 in BitTensor world right now, right? If you put it in Bitcoin terms.
So there's 10.5 coins that have been admitted to date. And the value is roughly the same as
Bitcoin was in 2013 also. So it's roughly 300 bucks, which is kind of wild, right? So it's following almost exactly
the same trajectory just sort of, you know, a decade or so later. And the other thing that's
different about it is that, so what are these contests? Well, they're all mostly crunching AI problems, right? So the network itself, the you find the hash of the previous block
that is incredibly valuable in terms of demonstrating in aggregate the bitcoin network's computational dominance uh it's earth's largest supercomputer right by 500 times
its nearest competitor so that's extremely valuable for securing the transactions on the blockchain.
However, what it's actually doing is really dumb.
It's basically guessing the number of gumballs in the jar, right?
When it's trying to find the hash of the previous block, it's just guessing.
It's like, what about this?
What about that one?
What about this one?
It's unwrapping Wonka bars like incredibly fast, right?
And if you have the most money, you could be like Veruca Salt and have just like a room of guys opening Wonka bars, right, looking for the hash.
And it's kind of dumb, right?
Like that doesn't really produce anything other than maybe a golden ticket, right?
So whereas in BitTensor, the act of trying to win the Wonka ticket is actually producing a lot of useful stuff and a lot of AI, right?
So the idea here is also that because it's proof of useful work,
right now a lot of it is mined through human brains, right?
So it's not just like Claude producing Claude.
It's not AI producing AI. A lot of times there are humans watching what's going on. They're mining with
their human intelligence and tweaking things. It's Claude assisted or it's AI assisted,
but it's largely human ingenuity that's being mined. So I like to say that what Bitcoin did for stranded energy,
BitTensor does for stranded talent. So if you're somewhere on earth, you can be someone anywhere
on earth. And if you're the smartest, you can go into the BitTensor universe, find a subnet.
And this whole thing, the network is divided up into subnets. Each one is a different AI project.
That's the way to think of it.
And so if you are a hyper intelligent person, but you're stranded in some country somewhere
where there is no Silicon Valley, but you've got access to a Starlink and a computer,
you can apply your smarts and start competing and winning in a subnet. And if you're the best in
the world, you can actually start winning contests pretty regularly. You might be able to even make
millions in a couple week period. That's actually happened before, right? So if you're incredibly
smart and competitive and contributing a lot of intelligence to the network, you can do
extraordinarily well. So any questions on that so far? Yeah, I'll go real quick. I'm curious.
So it's a UTXO based chain, correct? No, no, it is not. It is not a fork of Bitcoin. Okay.
Yeah, no, no, it's not. Sorry. Yeah, it's not a fork of Bitcoin because there are a lot of things
that it does that Bitcoin, the Bitcoin raw code can't do. It shares the tokenomic design, but it is not UTXO
based. So it's not EVM based either. No, it's not. Well, it has an EVM layer, but it is not
it's substrate. So it's like it's like a polka dot fork, basically. So, yeah, it's kind of weird,
right? It's got its own thinking. You cannot use a evm wallet um the native uh wallet
for it you have to get a bit tensor wallet and it's got its own you know it's got its own thing
going on but basically the wallets used to be pretty ganky up until like two months two three
months ago like hard to use like very early bitcoin wallets or like the wallet was in
ethereum right remember that i
don't know if you guys were around for that that period of time but yeah everyone's on a
centralized exchange right there's no no decks for a towel yet so there's no been no need for
the wallets really right well so i mean so again things in bit tents are a little weird right so
it's unlike anything else there is in fact a fact, a DEX inside of BitTensor.
Here's what's weird about it.
There is a Uniswap already, and I say that in air quotes.
Well, actually, it is technically truly Uniswap implemented directly on the chain.
So it's a canonical Uniswap.
And the reason for that is that each subnet is paired with the Tau token in this canonical Uniswap in the liquidity pools.
And what happens is that Tau and subnet tokens are emitted into the liquidity pool of this canonical Uniswap.
And that is how a new subnet is born.
So there's one Tau and i think it's two subnet tokens
that's how it that's how everything starts there's like no liquidity right and you're like well how
do i trade this and the answer is you don't until it grows enough liquidity for it to be reasonable
right and because at least at first it's like throwing a bowl it's like throwing a boulder
into a puddle trying to get in and this defeats the whales right this is great because you know
how remember the ico craze all these whales would come in and like slurp everything up before trying to get in. And this defeats the whales, right? This is great because you know how,
remember the ICO craze, all these whales would come in and like slurp everything up before
anybody got anything, right? That can't happen here. The wheels try to come in,
there's not enough liquidity, right? So they have to wait until it boots up, right? It has
to naturally grow into its liquidity, which it took like a year for the liquidity to get
reasonable. We've just gone
through that year so once again for a fair launch you need patience and non-greed and that's very
rare like most other chains don't have that right so that's brilliant and the liquidity grows by
people completing these tasks and getting rewards in these subnet tokens yes and they're so when you
get when you get the reward,
you're getting an LP unit basically right away,
or you're automatically in the liquidity pool.
Yes, that is a great way to think of it.
Yes, you're getting an LP token effectively.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here's a piece I haven't talked about yet.
So in order to get subnet tokens,
you must stake TAU into this liquidity pool.
There is no other way to get these tokens.
So what does that mean?
So it's very unlike any other chain, right?
Most chains, like with Ethereum or Solana or something,
you have the gas token,
and then you have like stuff built on top of it, right?
That is economically completely disconnected from the gas token.
All the subnet tokens in BitTensor are basically rehypothecated tau
because tau must be staked to get subnet tokens.
Now the liquidity pools grow or shrink
depending on the amount of demand there is
for the subnet tokens, right?
Makes sense.
So if you, you know, if I put 10,
let's say I put one tau in
and I get 10 subnet tokens back.
And if that subnet, the valuation of it, the market cap goes up wildly compared to all the other subnets.
Let's say this one becomes worth 50% of all the subnets.
Well, I come back with my 10 subnet tokens, I might get 100 tau back.
Because the liquidity pool has grown.
A lot of other people have come and put stake tau in, right?
So now if I come and cash out, I get a lot more tau back.
But the other flip side of that is, is that if you believe in Bitensor,
but you don't know which of the 128 subnets are going to take off,
you know, you can buy the S&P 500 by just owning tau, right? Because if any of them take off, if any of the subnets take off, you can buy the S&P 500 by just owning Tau, right? Because if any of them take
off, if any of the subnets take off, you're going to ride up with them just by owning Tau.
Fractionally, of course, you would have done a lot better if you just owned that subnet directly.
But owning the S&P 500, if Tesla goes crazy, it still drags the S&P 500 up with it, right?
Like to a certain degree. So it's like that, right?
It's really Tau and the subnet Tau paired with the subnet tokens is exact same
ID as Rune paired with all these different cryptos.
Yes.
Rune is like the S&P 500 of crypto.
So very interesting.
So the, okay, back to the subnets, apologies, Mark, my smooth brain,
lizard brain needs some time to catch up. So each subnet token is unique. Each subnet is unique.
And sorry, what is unique about each one? Like they're doing different tasks? They're solving,
like, you know, why are they different? Yeah. Why do they have value?
Yeah. So let's talk about specifically what some of them are doing and i've sort of stayed away from that
because i wanted to you know do the theoretical thing first but yeah you know all right let's get
down what the hell are they really doing right is it just bullshit or is it real so and it's
completely fair question so um so let's just start reading them off so first up we've got um actually
let's let's start with the star of the moment templar subnet
4. so if you and i if you know we want to make if you want to make a new version of chat gbt
or a new version of grok you have to either be sam altman or elon musk and own 200 000 and that's
actually the real number 200 000 gpus all co-located on a server farm, right,
somewhere, and Elon calls his Colossus, right?
That's his personal training rig
to make another version of Grok, right?
And so that's pretty cool,
but that also means nobody else
can make a frontier model, right?
That kind of sucks.
So, but imagine what
what did Bitcoin do really well, it recruited all this this insane amount of compute power
from all over the world to secure the network again, 500 times larger than the nearest competitor
supercomputer, right? Even now, Bitcoin absolutely dwarfs all AI,. AI is like, it's a little dot compared to this Jupiter-sized or sun-sized Bitcoin compute network.
It's still Earth's Mac daddy of compute.
So, well, this incentivization engine thing worked really once.
Bitcoin basically booted itself into existence through mining, right?
There was no company. There's no president of Bitcoin. There was just an incentive.
Hi, try to guess the hash of the previous block and you might win some Bitcoin if you're the fastest and the best at the contest, right?
So Bitensor was like, well, that worked really well once for Bitcoin, but we should do the same thing, except make the mining programmable in the same way Ethereum made smart contracts, right?
Like make the mining side of it programmable and the emissions go to whoever solves this contest the best, right?
So getting back to the Colossus, so imagine you want to do a decentralized Colossus, a Napsarized Colossus, right?
Build like a Bitcoin
mining network, but for training
AI. Like, is that even doable?
Well, that's what subnet 3,
Templar, set off to try to do.
And a few weeks ago...
Subnet 3 or subnet 4?
Subnet 3. Templar is subnet 3. I apologize.
I was looking at what I might have said 4. It is
subnet 3, Templar.
And there's 128, so it's number three.
It's one of the oldest ones, obviously.
They succeeded in training a 72 billion parameter model,
which is roughly one 300th of a frontier state-of-the-art model,
but it was thought to be impossible to do.
And the co-founder, Jack, I can't think of his last name,
but Jack, the co-founder of Anthropic,
saw the announcement and he was like,
who is doing this?
What is this?
I want to learn more about that.
He's been tweeting about it.
And he included it in the paper and said
it is Earth's largest decentralized training run
so far as he can tell.
People thought this was impossible
until Templar achieved it. And Chamath, on the all-in pod like a week and a half ago was discussing it with jensen
and chamath's words were like it's a pretty insane technical feat um so so it's turned a lot of heads
to it right so that's that's an early signal subnet and has done extremely well.
404 Gen does text to 3D.
And so if you play video games or you're in virtual worlds,
the bulk of the cost of making those things is generating the art assets, right?
So imagine just like with Grok Imagine, right? Imagine you could say, make me a machine gun that looks like that's green, right? Imagine you could say, uh, make me a machine gun. It looks like that's green,
right? And the AI generates the object. And that is, that's what 404 gen is. And it's text to 3d.
And they very quickly have amassed earth's largest library of 3d objects, 25 million objects,
right? Cause you make them with AI, right? So you just go a lot faster. So that's pretty interesting.
And they're integrated into all these,
like Unity Engine, like the Unity Editor.
They basically got a bunch of points now
that they resell their services into the 3D editors.
There's Nova, which is AI Pharma Molecule Discovery.
So normally, you know, finding a pharmaceutical molecule
is sort of like finding the hash of the previous block
where you're just trying a bunch of things, right?
So it's suitable for mining.
So what Nova does is it basically tells its miners,
hey, go out and try to find us a new pharmaceutical molecule.
And they've had some successes
where they have rediscovered things
that already exist and been like, oh, I found a hit.
And it turns out that's a patented molecule already.
So it's not something they can make money on.
But the fact that it found it again proves that the method works
and it can move a lot faster, right?
So NOVA is one of those things that we, you know,
it's one of those that could be a multi-billion dollar company overnight because they, they actually, once they find something,
they go and sell, um, the rights to that, to a, um, to a company, you know, to basically like a
wet lab, which then takes it the distance and gets the FDA approval. Like Nova doesn't do that.
They, it's sort of like selling the option to a a movie to a studio, right? We'll sell the option to this molecule,
and you can then do the wet lab work to find out whether it really works or not
and get it approved.
But that's a very early signal, right?
There's another one, SCORE, which is Subnet 44, which does computer vision.
So just it's giving AI the ability to understand what it's seeing.
You know, like when you're in a Waymo, right, it knows what's a car and what's a person.
Like it's good.
It knows how to identify what it's seeing.
Score is that, but broadly for all kinds of things.
And they've already got customers.
One of their big customers are amateur soccer or football in European terms, teams that basically doing
money ball type stuff by watching the playing of the players on that team.
And because they're using, and the other thing I should point out is that all these
bit nets or subnets by and large cost one 10th what their centralized competitors are offering the same product for.
And in many cases, the product quality is actually higher in BitTensor.
Why? Because the miners are supplying the actual thing that you're then reselling,
and the miners are competing with each other.
There's 256 miners all competing to do the best and the fastest at all of these contents.
all competing to do the best and the fastest at all of these contests, right?
So who supplies that for Score44?
Who supplies that understanding of what is being seen in the visual field?
The miners do.
The miners tweak the AI models that are understanding the vision, right?
And they're all trying to one-up each other.
Why?
So they can get subnet tokens because the chain pays you, right?
It's exactly how Bitcoin works. It's just done again and programmable. Questions?
Yes, I do. Oh, sorry, Kenton. Well, okay. The last thing you said, you said 256 miners. Is
that just happenstance, the SHA-256? Or is that just how many are currently mining right now?
Or is there like some limit i
just i thought 256 was such an interesting number yeah yeah no it is it's for the same reason so
it's you know those those numbers pop up in comp and computer stuff all the time there's 256 slots
that have been allotted per subnet for miners right got you. Like, why not have more?
Like, is it, is it, if the more gets slower, like, that's kind of like the sweet spot of,
like, decentralization.
That I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I think probably that's, that's exactly the reason it's sort of the sweet spot.
It's, you know, it, it, it fits with binary, you know, the best and going above it.
The next jump up would be 1024 and that feels like too much.
Right. So. Yeah. It's possible. Yeah. I'm sorry. Thorchain has a similar problem, right? best and going above it the next jump up would be 1024 and that feels like too much right so yeah
it's possible yeah i'm sorry thor chain has a similar problem right there's diminishing returns
the amount of nodes that you add because it the computational it's a it's a quadratic increase
when you linearly increase the thing so there there's a problem there absolutely okay so um
kenton i don't know what you're thinking right now but i really think we need to get tau on
thor chain buddy i don't know what you guys are thinking but't know what you're thinking right now, but I really think we need to get towel on Thorchain, buddy. I don't know what you guys are thinking, but that's what I'm
thinking right now. I'm getting pumped up. But okay, so I got a question. I'm sorry,
Kenton. The daemon, what is it like to run a node for BitTense? There's all these subnets,
like is it really expensive? Denny, before we get into that question,
can I ask more about subnets? Sure.
Yeah, yeah.
That's okay.
Go ahead.
Yes.
So one subnet can have multiple different miners on it, up to 256, right?
Correct.
Okay.
So these miners, but they're all working on one subnet is one,
the same problem, like the visualizer you're just talking about,
they're all working on the same code. The same, is it, they're actually,
so they're not just providing computing power to this code.
They're actually rewriting the code as well to improve upon it.
Depends on the subnet, but but yes that is a frequent thing that is
done and it is done with score so the biggest contest is ridges and ridges is a clawed cursor
killer so it basically is you know a vibe coding platform and it is scored higher. And the contest there is to continually increase this agent, which sits on top
of commodity models like DeepSeq, and there's a few other models it sits on top of. So it's
basically like, let's take a dopey LLM, slap a preprocessor on top of it, and together that
equals or is better than Claude Code. And it has beaten Claude code on the SWE benchmark,
which is sort of like the SAT
for finding out how smart a vibe coding platform is
versus humans and the polyglot test.
So it's actually, it's a higher quality.
And because everything is built
and because they're using frontier models
and what powers ridges is another subnet, Targon subnet 4,
which provides very cheap inference for like, you know, basically one seventh the cost of what
anyone else is providing it for. So you got subnets using subnets and each one of them is,
you know, one seventh to one tenth off, you know, 90% off what, uh, in terms of the services they're providing to the other subnet.
So you get these compounding cost savings by subnet stacking, right.
Which is pretty, it's pretty unique.
This is so fascinating.
It is. Yeah. No, I, um,
I probably should ask you questions for hours. Maybe I should, should.
No, no, please.
Um, well, so like. So if these miners are all on one subnet,
we have dozens of miners contributing to it,
and each one is writing their own versions of their code,
trying to come up with something better.
As a user on this subnet,
how am I using 10 different versions of code? How am I?
You're not.
How is the best version coming out on top and the lower quality code not being used, right?
Like, I don't understand how that works.
It just doesn't use, right? So if I use ridges right now, I'm using the latest winner, always,
right? And depends on sort of what the mining network is doing.
But when it's sort of chugging along, it's like daily, there's a new winner.
So it's continuous improvement.
And then kind of like with Bitcoin mining, it's the longest hash that becomes the new truth chain right so with with bic with 10 bit tensor and these subnets
it's the best quality code becomes the new chain becomes a new one and all the other miners have
to adopt it and keep on improving on that yeah so when some enriches when somebody wins there's
only one winner like it's different like the contests are different depending on the subnet.
In ridges, it's winner take all.
Some of the other subnets, it's not.
Some of the other subnets, it's like everybody gets something.
You're just sort of graded on a curve, right?
But in ridges, it's winner take all because they want it to be absolutely
the most ferocious form of capitalism ever, right?
They want it to be the Hunger Games, right?
Or Highlander.
There can be only one, right? Like, to be the Hunger Games. Or Highlander, there can be only one, right?
That's what they want. So if you are, you know, you basically got this, so that's how they're producing, that's how they're so wickedly competitive versus Claude, right? They've spent
like maybe a million or two getting here versus Claude spending, you know, hundreds of billions.
million or two getting here versus Claude spending, you know, hundreds of billions.
Like the efficiency is insane, right?
And it mirrors sort of Bitcoin's crazy efficiency, right?
Just imagine if you tried to do, imagine if Bitcoin had been founded in a different way,
right?
Let's roll back to 2008.
You're Satoshi Nakamoto and you decide like instead of booting up a mining network, you're
going to go get venture capital funding.
And so you go to Silicon Valley with your little suit and your little PowerPoint.
And Sequoia comes in and says, yes, Mr. Nakamoto, we'd love to fund your, what is it called again, Bitcoin?
Yes, this virtual currency, we think it can work, right? You'd raise like $10 million, and then you would pay. You'd basically set up AWS instances all over the world.
You would pay.
Just imagine the expense of setting up the mining network if you're paying for all of it yourself.
It's not decentralized.
You control it all, but you still want that computational hash rate up because that's what provides the security, except now you're paying for it.
Versus contestonomics, where you have a bunch of miners, nobody's paying them.
There's no payroll.
There's no contracts.
There's just, hey, there's a contest, and if you win it, you get coins.
That's it. You miner, you donate electricity, CPU, GPU, and colo rack space and
cooling and all that. Just donate it. I don't compensate you for that. You might win nothing.
A lot of these guys win nothing and they go out of business. And then some people win and they
hold on to their Bitcoin and it became fabulously wealthy right both things happened but uh you know
as as the sort of network owner I don't have to pay for all that right so it was it was what the
way Satoshi did it was insanely more efficient in terms of the network getting the best quality work
right like the network got the most value out of that contestonomics right and if somebody's dead weight
at mining they get kicked out nobody cares yeah so okay so what i'm understanding this with like
with ai like traditional ai like you mentioned cloud and yeah chat dpt and all them like
um colossus you have to have these huge data centers um so basically bit tensor makes it
possible these subnets make it possible to decentralize these data centers so that you could be accessing an LLM model on a, you know, if it grows, once it scales, could easily dwarf any centralized data center and in turn, therefore, therefore be more powerful of an AI.
Correct.
Correct.
In fact, the reason why Jensen and Chamath noticed Templar as well as the
Anthropic co-founder is because these guys know that at a certain point,
they're not going to be able to buy more GPU, like for their, for their Colossus.
They're going to be like, well, I want to go to 400,000 GPU.
Oh, guess what?
Those GPUs aren't available. They're already sold.
There's not new ones, right? You know,
we had this helium thing going on from the, uh, from the, you know,
from the Iran war, right?
So all of a sudden we could be in a world where there's even less GPUs being
made, right? There's none. So that could happen.
But right now there's still, it's still,
they're all fighting each other to get those GPUs.
The only path forward is a decentralized network, where you basically incentivize people who already own the GPUs that you want to rent them to you, to gig work for you, just like Bitcoin did.
Bitcoin recruited a lot of gig workers with fallowed CPU and said, hey, you might be able to make a lot of money.
So BitTensor lets anyone do the same thing but for AI.
So let me take you through a specific example because this might help a little bit.
So I recently mined subnet 85 called vidAIO.
And what that subnet does is it crunches video.
So it provides video upscaling.
So it takes like the quality of the video and makes it better using AI and using sort of perceptual cues.
Like it's does it make it does it make it higher resolution?
No, it takes advantage of quirks of the eye to make it look like it's higher resolution based on sort of perceptual tricks that the AI like knows.
Right. So there's upscaling and then of perceptual tricks that the AI like knows, right?
So there's upscaling and then there's compression, make the file smaller.
That is what the subnet does.
Now, what does the contest do?
Well, the contest is, you know, person that wants to mine me, go rent a machine and put it in a write your own code for upscaling and compressing.
Right.
So I, in my past, I've been a CTO and a coder,
but not anytime recently.
I'm super rusty.
So I wasn't about to attempt to do this by hand.
But when OpenClaw came out, I all of a sudden went, wait, I bet I could use a claw to vibe mine AI vidIO subnet 85.
So I set off on a mission to see if I could do it, right?
So that was the challenge. And it took to see if I could do it, right? So that was the
challenge. And it took me about two weeks to get there, right? Because the claws are kind of stupid
in some ways. And so there was some dumb, half of it was like dumb. I had to fix dumb problems.
And also I had to wait 24 hours to figure out whether my current solution was working or not
because the contests were in 24-hour cycles so that slowed me down a little bit also um so but but in the end i did get there so my claw set up my vibe miner on uh on a
machine and i could have used targon subnet 4 but i didn't because my i just wanted to let the claw
the claw was familiar with something else so i let it do what it wanted to but you know if i if i had
to do it over again,
I would have forced it to use Targon subnet four
because everything is one 10th the cost,
versus everything else because of the contestonomics
of the BitTensor ecosystem.
So why am I paying 10x?
Well, because convenience for the initial attempt
of the mining.
But anyway, so however, i was not near the top
of the pack i was sort of out of 256 miners i was like 240 and i asked my claw why and it's like
well your algorithm sucks it's the best i can do but you know your algorithm for compressing and
upscaling sucks so i was like oh well i'm going to try to use ridges subnet 62 to vibe code a better compressor and upscaler.
So I had my claw write the spec, right?
I said, claw, write a spec and tell it, you know, what should I tell ridges?
So I wrote a big long spec.
I fed it into ridges.
Ridges, it took it a night.
It took like eight hours for it to run, but it dumped off the code that it produced into my GitHub.
And then I told my clause like
here it is go get it so i went and slurped it down and it it's ridges 3x the speed of my compressing
and upscaling which my claw could not do which i'm not sure why i couldn't do it but it couldn't
so ridges is is a vibe coding you know it's it's that this is what it does in life so it's just a
lot better at it so all of a sudden i was competitive so i i'm vibe
mining subnet 85 and i'm earning subnet 85 tokens and i'm using uh other subnet stuff to do it right
so pretty cool wow that is that's it's we're already there we're like ai is improving on this
ai improving on that ai and it's just going to get this compounding effect.
I mean, that's so the subnet.
So now if I want to use one of these subnets, I have to pay in the subnet token.
And no, you just pay you can just pay fiat.
So it depends on it.
Again, it depends on the subnet.
But the idea of subnets is you use the commodity, the digital commodity, the AI commodity that's been produced.
Like if you're somebody that just wants to compress an upscale video, you just go to vidai.ai, I think is the site, and you just swipe a credit card, right? And they basically use that to buy back subnet tokens on the back end.
to buy back subnet tokens on the back end.
That's how they work.
Now, there are other subnets that have different tokenomics,
but in general, the revenue that's coming in
goes to buying subnet tokens back.
What's great about that,
I mean, obviously that pushes the price up
when there's more buying, right?
All the subnets have to compete with each other
in order to get emissions.
So it's not just miners competing against miners.
The subnets are in competition with each other.
And the subnets, and broadly speaking, and I'm lying a little bit here,
but broadly speaking, this is correct.
The subnet with the largest market cap gets the most emissions, right?
So if you own 10% of the subnets, add up all the subnets,
whatever that market cap is, the total market cap,
if you have 10 of that in
roughly speaking you get 10 of the emissions right you get 50 of it you get 50 of the emissions
right so they're all fighting each other for supremacy there so they're incentivized to buy
back their tokens to keep their price up right there are some subnets which require you to buy
their their subnet tokens and stake them in order to get the right to mine.
So it's a stake to mine subnet.
Hippias, which is a storage subnet 75, that's how it works.
So, and just again, forgive me, just trying to like kind of.
Yeah, no, there's a lot to absorb here.
I totally get it.
Is it okay to view these subnet tokens, these subnets like ERC-20s on Tau?
Like each subnet token is its own unique token on Tau?
Is that a simple way?
Conceptually, yes.
Conceptually look at it, yeah.
They're limited to 21 million only, so the tokenomics are locked.
You can't define different tokenomics, and they are admitted.
Yeah, so it's the same thing.
So each subnet is the same tokenomics.
Interesting. Yes. Okay. Each subnet only's the same subnet is the same tokenomics interesting yeah okay
each subnet only has 21 million subnet tokens total okay they're emitted on a schedule with
a having schedule every two years as opposed to every four years but it's um so most subnets right
now there's only two to three million subnet tokens per subnet. Got you. Got you. Because of the time that they started.
Okay.
Correct.
So, okay.
Let's, let's wave a magic wand right here.
Let's say we hit Tau on ThorChain, right?
Magic wand time.
Now, is it, it would, maybe it's worthwhile to add the ERC20 versions of certain subnets
onto ThorChain.
Do you think that's doable as well?
Like can,
yeah,
I can have liquidity pools for them as well.
Okay.
Absolutely.
In fact,
I think you should.
Okay.
I just wonder if how,
do you know that,
do you have any,
is that easy to do?
Or maybe you don't know,
but I have a lot.
I'm sorry.
I'm actively constructed a model in my mind.
I'm trying to ask a question. Sorry. Okay. Go ahead.
It should be like, well, I'll jump in maybe.
For ThorChain's point of view, the major lift is getting the L1,
getting the gas token liquidity pool going.
After that is done, I believe in theory,
the other supported ERC20s on that L1 is much easier to do, to get going.
So there's two nodes, right?
So I'm just trying to understand.
So there's nodes for bit temps for Tau, and then there's individual nodes for the subnets, right? right but if you have the main daemon of tau on thor chain that covers the ability to send
transactions of these subnets as well as so i'm trying to understand i think so yes
i basically i'm pretty sure that's correct um but we're now we're now in weeds right no that's
that's what i'm struggling with my mind is like what how many daemons do we get thrown here is
it just like one daemon for towers do you have to add a separate daemon for the subnet it's one daemon
for tau i'm pretty sure okay okay okay interesting um yeah because if they got if they if you if
tau technically has a dex where you can swap tau for these subnet tokens right right right right
so correct right okay that's what I'm thinking.
That's why I'm thinking.
So I have, I've done it.
This is this, I'm not an expert at this piece of it.
My guess is probably yes.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Okay.
Wow.
This is, this is super interesting, Mark.
I am a huge fan.
Go ahead, Kenton.
No, I don't know if I'll keep going.
Well, I did have one last point I wanted to make.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you look at these subnets, right. and, you know, something like Ridges, right,
the valuation of Ridges at the moment is like 40 to 50 million total.
You know, what's the value of Claude, you know, its main competitor?
I think it's like 50 billion with a B, I'm pretty sure, something like that.
So there's massive dislocation in terms of orders of magnitude you know if if
if ridges is beating clod at the sweet benchmark and polyglot tests um you know even you know it
should be worth a lot more than 40 to 50 million because bottom line like it should be at least a
couple hundred million right so i mean just bare you know minimum. The world at large has not yet discovered and properly priced
subnets. Personally, I think Ridges should be like a billion-dollar subnet. We have no billion-dollar
subnets. They're roughly between 1 million and the highest is about 130 million in terms of market
cap. All extremely small. Why? Because this is a weird little world and the world hasn't, and the rest of the world hasn't discovered it yet. Right. But once they do, like the snowball
has not started rolling yet. Right. But once people are like, you have people like Tramath
and Jensen starting to talk about it. Like you're starting to see that the little tremors before
the avalanche, right? Like it feels like to me. So, um, so if you are a miner on one of these subnets and you win the contest,
there is an ownership layer in the subnet tokens that allow you to own that subnet.
So if you think that that subnet is going to go crazy at some point,
you're very happy that you are an owner in that subnet.
If you think Ridgesges if the price dislocation
of ridges versus anthropic um starts to correct and let's just say it becomes worth a billion
right so that's what is that's like roughly a 20 25 x from where we're at right now if you think
that's going to happen you should maybe hold on to the subnet token right so you you you participate
in the success of the thing that you helped mine in exactly the same way that if you mined early Bitcoin, you participated in Bitcoin success if you hung on, right?
So it's the same sort of dynamic.
So I just looked up quick.
The market cap for BitTensor is about $3 billion.
billion yes and you said the the subnets in total are around 50 million so no no the total of all
Yes.
And you said the subnets in total are around $50 million?
subnets is about 1.5 billion right now and that's separate that's separate from top i don't know
it's confusing so there there are two you know uh you know numbers to watch yeah oh sorry i thought
so but the or the largest subnet is only worth 50 million is that what you said largest subnet is only worth $50 million. Is that what you said earlier? The largest subnet is $130 million.
That's as big as it's ever gotten.
Got it, got it.
Okay, so then this makes a bit more sense.
Of all the subnets, you add up all their market caps, about $1.5 billion.
Yes.
The Tau token itself is about $3 billion.
Yep.
So the way I interpret that is a market is is just they're just
speculating on tau they're kind of like like in theory those subnets could they in total could
they have a larger market cap sure yeah yeah because that would be not all TAUs paired in liquidity pools. If some held out.
How would that work?
Just trying to think if one can never exceed the other, right?
It's going to drag up the price of TAU, right?
Because you're absolutely right that they are related, right?
Because public tokens are TAU, right?
In a certain sense.
Right.
So the question is, it's it's roughly gonna it's gonna remain
roughly one-to-one right so um can it exceed the mark actually probably can't exceed the market
capital i'm thinking about it yeah right the tail can't wag the dog right yeah tau would always have
to be larger market cap than all of the subnets up. If all of the tau is staked in the liquidity pools, then it would...
So it's not all staked in the liquidity pools, so that's just to be clear.
That's why it trades at a premium.
If it was all staked, then it would trade one-to-one
with the total market cap of the subnets.
Correct.
Okay. the subnets correct um okay and then but if somebody wants to speculate more on an individual
subnet maybe they want to try and get outsized return relative to tau they can buy the individual
subnet tokens okay um all right this is okay this is cool this is making sense yeah yeah yeah cool um so uh gosh i could keep going on and on this is a this is
freaking cool man um so uh what is it okay the daemon on tau because you know the okay node
operators are going to pay attention to this they're going to watch this either now or later
right the recording of this um could you give an insight what is it like to run a daemon of Tau?
That I wouldn't be able to answer. Sorry.
Okay. No big deal. No big deal.
Okay. Another question. The community of Tau. Hi, guys. Hi out there.
How big are they? Like, you know, we're the 14th community.
We're, you know, we're reaching out. We're saying hi to them.
What's the Tau community look like? What do they make up of, you know,
could give a sense of that? Maybe we don't know. I don't know.
Well, there's a lot.
I mean, I talk to the subnet people, right, mostly because I'm a subnet hunter.
Right.
So I'm not really talking to this.
And there's some speculators I'm talking to, but largely it's just a parade of subnet owners
and other ecosystem participants, other sort of fund operators and other venture capitalists like me, right?
So we're all sort of comparing now.
It's like, what are you saying?
You know, last night I had dinner with Sam
who runs Templar, the guy that does
the decentralized Colossus, right?
So that's my life.
And then last weekend I was up in San Francisco
for a thing called Breakout,
where a bunch of subnet operators and some new,
there's also a lot of AI developers sort of circling this area,
because they figured out that they can mine at night
if they're working at Anthropic or they're working at Meta.
There's actually a lot of people that are moonlighting now,
mining, using their AI machine learning engineer skills to mine.
They figured out they can mine BitTensor,
and they can actually, you know,
in some cases make like 50K a day.
So they're like, well, I'll mine BitTensor
for like two weeks and make a million bucks, right?
And there are people doing that.
So as these people sort of find their way over to us,
and in some cases they're making more
than they make in their salary,
mining BitTensor subnets, right?
So that's starting to happen with greater frequency
in our little world here.
I don't know how many people, I don't know,
I have actually looked recently at how many wallets there are.
It's still relatively small, but I would say,
I mean, how many people are involved in BitTensor right now?
20 to 50,000, something like that would be my guess
wow not massive but it's not nothing yeah it's not nothing well i didn't mean nothing like like
but i mean relative speaking like it's it's very yeah relative it's not like it's not a theorem
right yeah yeah there's not as big as that obviously so i think it could be but we're not
anywhere near that yet i was thinking about earlier you're
talking about you know people are still new to tau don't know anything about it finding out like
i just thinking about you know just you look at the market in general you know we're in a bear
market everyone has their head in the sand a lot of people are checked out not in bit sensor
no i mean honestly in the subn, it's a bull market right now.
So, you know, especially if you denominate everything in Tau.
So anyway, but we're having fun.
It doesn't feel like a bear market. Of course.
But the people who, they just say Tau is one of the handfuls that are doing okay, the standouts, right?
And like, you know, most people, i think they're stuck in their ecosystems you know
they got their blinders on they're not really looking at anything else because they're down
things are going good they're they're not the motivation they're looking at anything new um
and then and that's within the crypto world and crypto is still us getting there we're definitely getting more mainstream but but then going to ai ai is
still like they're still like ai is still very early like a lot of people don't really understand
it they're not using it so then you mix in ai with crypto and they're it's just like man that's
too much to wrap my head around so um where's going with this is like this like it's still
super early for bit tensor to like for people to be able to wrap their head around so um where's going with this is like this like it's still super early for bit
tensor to like for people to be able to wrap their head around it and um get familiar with it so a
long way to go hey um yeah it's hard to understand i mean i'm it's complex for sure yeah but i'm
getting there man i'm totally getting there you're you're i'm vibing right now i have a question so if okay
what is the frequency of subnets um that die right because here's the thing on thor chain if you add
a token on thor chain it's there right it is there in order to remove it it requires a ragnarok
process it's kind of a it's a you know it's kind of a big deal so um are subnets like constantly
deal so um are subnets like constantly popping in and out of existence or are they are they okay
okay so if we add one go ahead go for the floor is yours go ahead you have brought up I understand
what you're trying to ask me and it is a problem so um the way so basically there's something called
subnet the registration so remember how I say you know within BitTensor, everything is contests within contests within contests.
The chain regularly looks for and calls the weakest link.
You are the weakest link. You'll die. Right.
And what happens is, yeah, the weakest link is defined.
The weakest subnet is that's it's like upward deregistration.
And basically, if it's market cap doesn't rapidly improve, you know, if nobody's interested in it,
then it's it's pinned for deregistration and deregistration comes along.
It liquidates the liquidity pool completely.
So basically, whatever you just get back, however much Tau is in that liquidity pool for your subnet tokens are liquidated automatically.
You don't have there's no like come back and liquidate yourself.
No, it happens right
in your wallet we just reach in your wallet we change you back into tau there's nothing you can
do about it right that's interesting so the chain is a little bit savage right so it will remote
uh liquidate what that those subnet tokens back into tau wherever those subnet tokens are so the
subnet tokens are in a liquidity pool on your end, right, if you were to make a liquidity pool with, you know, say subnet 20 and Tau, sorry, subnet
20 and Rune, right, so that liquidity pool would exist somewhere on the BitTensor node,
I believe, that powers the Thor chain. And so within that node, there would be a wallet and the subnet 20 tokens would just turn into Tau overnight.
So the Ragnarok itself.
Yeah, the Ragnarok itself, yeah.
So that's what would happen.
So I don't know how you guys would feel about that,
but that's what would happen.
I guess as long as we're getting the Tau,
then we can at least maybe convert it into the Tau pool
and just,
yeah.
And then the subnet and then subnet,
and then subnet four is then resold to someone and,
or sold in an auction.
So people are always trying to snap up,
especially now they're trying to snap up new,
use subnets,
right.
And sometimes people just sell their subnets that they just give up.
And so they sell their subnet manually,
including all of the circulating supply of subnet tokens.
They're like, look, there's a community out there
of like 500 people that have subnet tokens
or whatever it is.
You know, just they get whatever the new subnet is, right?
So that's another way it can happen as well.
Very interesting. the new subnet is right so that that's another way it can happen as well very interesting
denny you asked uh mark about the tau community um mark weren't like uh weren't you in a meeting
the other day between the the tau like foundation and devs and and thor chain about getting yes i
was yeah i didn't know i didn't know they were being public about that. That's why I haven't mentioned it. No, I think it's great.
No, no, it's fine.
I mean, it was done now.
Okay, let's do it, yeah.
Yeah, no, it's-
Well, I mean, nothing is official, but you guys are talking,
and I couldn't make that meeting.
But the point was just to open, nothing was decided.
It's just, let's start having the conversation.
Well, so I showed up on your doorstep like a year ago,
and I was like, hey, ThorChain,
we should basically be enabling ThorChain on BitCensor.
And you guys, you weren't interested yet?
And I understand why.
It just wasn't a priority, right?
And so it wasn't big enough.
Yeah.
I mean, BitCensor, frankly, wasn't where it is today.
It wasn't nearly as sort of
bigger in the public conscious as the way it is now so so now when you guys came back i was like
oh look who came crawling back knocking on my door
in our slight defense a year ago we got kicked in the nuts as hard as we've ever been kicked in our life.
So I think we're like, but that's hilarious.
Hilarious.
Yeah, we come back slithering in our belly.
That's right.
We actually love you.
We're so sorry.
Yeah, that's OK.
We'll eat that crow.
We'll eat that crow for sure.
Yeah, we get we're kind of under new management now.
So I like to think we're a different view on things and different
motivations to get different things done. And I believe adding new chains like
like Tau is one of those things we want to move forward. So really appreciate you, Mark,
being that ambassador, bridging that gap, being involved with that meeting, hopefully
some more coming on the podcast right now i really
appreciate you thank you yeah i appreciate that i appreciate you guys doing this i was i you know
all jokes aside i was extremely happy when you guys showed up because i have long wanted personally
just for my own usage a onboarding pathway for raw bitcoin raw native bitcoin into raw native tau
boarding pathway for raw Bitcoin, raw native Bitcoin into raw native Tau.
I can't do it right now other than using a centralized exchange.
There is no way.
Unacceptable.
Let's fix this.
This is something that is, for adding new chains on ThorChain,
can sometimes be a bit of a debate.
It's like, you know, well, we add these chains,
but then it becomes zombie pools no one's
trading in them nobody knows about them whatever so we had a bit tensor pool we know mark's gonna
use it do you do you have any insight can you any kind of feel that like would there be other people
that want to use it do you think like how would it be received in the bit sensor community um
okay yeah i mean i think i think the bulk of the usage will come so what i
think is going to happen is i i think we're in this little gestation moment right now uh sort
of like the way i don't know you guys remember ethereum like when it first launched right like
it was it kind of bobbled around between six dollars and twelve dollars for a long time for
like two years right sort of like you know we got Vitalik out there going, world computer.
And everyone's like, we don't care.
Who fucking cares?
What is this useful for?
The maxis were in full force back then too.
It's a scam.
Don't touch it.
Yeah.
There was a lot of sort of that going on.
Right?
And then sort of something happened where, you know, the ICO phase happened.
Right?
And all of a sudden we knew what it was good for, at least one use case, making new tokens, and, and frankly, capital formation.
You know, there's a lot of bad capital formation, but there's also a lot of good ones, right?
And no one at the earth had not seen this, this sort of Kickstarter, you know, ish way of booting
up new coins, right? And, and there was a lot that was really great about that, a lot that was horrible,
but also a lot that was great. And then we had the DeFi era, like, you know, maybe a year or two after that, where we got decentralized exchanges and decentralized lending and some other things,
right? And stable coins, right? So it turned out a lot of those financial primitives were also very
good developments and very useful things
that were booted up on top of Ethereum. And we saw the price of Ethereum go from $6 to $12 to like
$120 to $250 to $1,000, then up to like $4,500, right, sort of at its peak. And it sort of happened
real fast, right? Like this sort of flywheel got going because there were all these new protocols built on top of Ethereum.
And the only way you could get in on the ICOs or buy into the new protocols was to have Ethereum.
That same thing, that same dynamic is true in Tau.
In order to buy Tau subnets, you have to have Tau the coin.
And there's no real easy way to get Tau to Coin except to KYC or use a centralized exchange.
There are a lot of people that don't like that or can't do that because they're in XYZ country or whatever.
So you're not in that moment. We're not in that frenzy moment yet on BitTensor.
But I think that frenzy moment happens this year.
And I think once that happens, if people realize some of these other people suddenly that want to get into um to BitTensor and the subnets they'll need Tao they'll
be like well I got a bunch of Bitcoin how can I buy these subnets oh I could just use Thor chain
Bitcoin to Tao Tao to subnet now now I have a pathway in and I and I so I think it's a bet
on those people who aren't here yet but they will be soon I think that's what's going on. You just told me I'm like, we got to prioritize how we got to get this going.
Oh, dude, 100%.
I'm curious.
Okay, so all right.
So it's on a centralized exchange.
And that is essentially the Oracle price, right?
Whatever the centralized exchange.
And for those, you know, obviously centralized exchanges, it's a black box.
You know what I mean?
You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on. And that is essentially the Oracle price, right? Whatever the centralized exchange.
And for those, you know, obviously centralized exchanges, it's a black box.
You know what I mean? You don't know what's going on, really.
With ThorChain, though, then this is a natural market at this point because...
Oh, man, I'm sorry. My mind is just... My wheels are turning right now.
So this is great. We've got to add Tau, you guys. Let's add frick'm, I'm, I'm on, I'm on board. You know what I mean? Because, um, yeah, this is
totally unacceptable that you guys do not have a way to go layer one to layer one. You have to
switch IOUs on a fricking sex, you know, and the, the subnets, the whole network itself is doing
such incredible things, but there's a centralized entity to it. That's not the vision of Tao.
I know that's not your vision.
That's what you want, Mark.
I mean, especially you write this book of Bitcoin
talking about this decentralized, free, open, fair,
permissionless ethos.
Yeah.
This is a match made in heaven right here.
I love it.
It's like privacy coming on ThorChain.
It's a match made in heaven.
LFG.
You couldn't say it any better, too have bitcoin you want to buy tau you know you
have bitcoin you want to buy something else with it and it's like this is how i you know pitch it
to their layer ones i'm like do you want to tap into a trillion dollars of liquidity like oh yeah
you can't get on any other decks than door chain like and because there's a lot of bitcoin that
doesn't want to touch centralized exchanges right you know That's its own kind of own world. That's right. And you're cutting
yourself off from however many billions of liquidity from Bitcoin. And that's the whole
reason companies want to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange or in the US in general is to access capital, access liquidity.
And ThorChain is the largest Bitcoin DEX in the world.
Like, you know, you can do tens, you know, easily five, ten million dollar Bitcoin trades.
You want access to that, you want your L1 to get access to that liquidity, it's ThorChain.
So that's, that that's and it's funny
i bring out some l1s it kind of does look at me funny i'm like how do you not how do you not get
that um well i get exactly what you're saying i i feel like um you know i i also feel like with
bitensor there there because of the bitcoin like ethosos of it, it is, like, you guys know Barry
Silbert, obviously, right? Like, he has said that the thing that he's most, he hasn't been this
excited about a new thing, like, he's excited about BitTensor, and he says, I haven't been this
excited since Bitcoin, because it feels sort of similar, right? Obviously, the tokenomics,
but also the ethos and sort of, you know, the
reinvention of mining, you know, making mining programmables is a completely new thing. Nobody's
done that before, right? So I think it excites the imagination of the Bitcoin people specifically.
There's a lot of Bitcoin people that will never invest in anything else other than BitTensor,
right? Because it's the only thing, other thing that feels kind of similar, right?
Yes, this was me, my journey at DoorChain.
Because I heard Eric Voorhees talk about not being excited
since the first learning of Bitcoin.
Because I was thinking about it too.
I'm like, when I figured out DoorChain, I was like, this is huge.
How do other people not know about this?
And I saw Eric talking about it.
I'm like, okay, some good confirmation bias.
But Mark, it's funny because I kind of started a thing to try to get a meme thing going
in ThorChain, the prophecy of thrith, which is ThorChain becoming the third largest crypto
by market cap. And my reasoning was that Binance, BNB token,
was the third largest market cap token at one point. And if Thorchain is decentralized Binance,
it can be bigger than Binance. And so why can't this market cap be bigger one day?
And so that was my justification for Thorchain being the third largest crypto.
But you also, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll do some Googling on you. You think BitTensor
could be the third most important crypto, which in turn, I would assume could be the third largest
market cap crypto. Sounds plausible for sure. You're absolutely right. I've frequently referred to it as the third great coin alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And I think of it more like in terms of the innovation, right?
So you have Bitcoin and then you have Ethereum, which built out the smart contract side of Bitcoin and sort of made a whole world over here.
And then BitTensor, which makes the mining programmable
and builds out this whole little world over here.
And that's a very different little world from this one.
And I think we have not explored this half of Bitcoin.
So I feel like in terms of importance and technical innovation,
it is the third great coin.
I mean, I love all the other things that,
all the other things are more like we're faster. Or we're more private. Privacy is also one of the third great coin. I mean, I love all the other things that, all the other things are more like we're faster, right?
Or we're more private.
Like privacy is also one of the other things now.
But yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, you can have third.
We have Bitcoin, Ethereum, BitTensor,
and then third chain, we'll take fourth.
We'll take fourth.
We're the liquidity between the three.
That's it.
That's pretty big.
We'll be the fourth great coin.
There you go.
May the fourth be with us, buddy. That's fine with me. I'll take it. We'll be the fourth. Yeah, I'll be the fourth Bitcoin. There you go. May the fourth be with us, buddy.
That's fine with me.
I'll take it.
No big deal.
You know what I'm saying?
Hey, Mark, this is an incredible live stream.
I could go for hours and hours, but I want to make sure.
Do you want to talk about Stillcore Capital?
Is there anything you want?
I want to make sure we flesh out everything about you.
Is there anything on that you want to pursue or talk about? What's Stillcore Capital, is there anything you want? I want to make sure we flesh out everything about you. Is there anything on that you want to pursue or talk about?
What's Stillcore Capital?
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So Stillcore Capital is my fund.
And I have two other partners.
One of them is Jason Calcanis.
And then there's another guy named Rob Greer.
And we are exclusively focused on the BitTensor Tau ecosystem.
And, yep, that's us.
And we're basically investing in subnets.
So Tau and subnets, but mostly subnets.
And we're for accredited investors only, I need to say that.
So if you're accredited, just go to stillcorecapital.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
And we publish little papers.
In fact, if you scroll down a little bit,
there's a paper I wrote in January called The State of of tau yeah actually just scroll by it go go back up yeah right there
in the middle so state of tau this is sort of my attempt to write a tau for dummies so if you're
like hey i want to learn more i would highly recommend right you know clicking on this and
and and looking at that p. And it's all free.
Anybody can, you know, go get these things.
We don't, you know, we don't charge or try to collect your email address or anything like that.
Just go click, you get it.
And, you know, so we're always putting out stuff like this.
And then I run a podcast called Hash Rate, which I publish mostly on my X feed.
And that's mostly sort of subnet of the week right i'm always
talking to whoever's doing the most interesting thing that week to me um and i cross publish to
youtube but most of the views are on x so uh and i i basically spend my life doing those two things
what's the uh at for your hash rate podcast on x uh it's just on my mark jeff at mark jeffrey um yeah i just i just from my personal yeah
so the latest one is is pinned to the top of my feed which i just did yesterday
so it's called beam b-e-a-m so yeah let me get this here stop perfect awesome
man this has been this is live stream is blowing my freaking mind right now.
I absolutely love this. Here he is, guys.
This is at Mark Jeffrey.
All one word. That is his name. That is
X. You need to follow Mark right
now. The Hash Rate Podcast.
This guy is changing the world.
He is a legend. He is an OG.
Not only in the internet,
the internet itself, you guys, but
he's been around for a long time.
And I always love someone who's a believer in Thor chain. You know what I mean?
This is great. Fantastic. I love it, Mark. Yeah, if you're an accredited investor,
I don't know. I believe in following first principles.
Their first principles seem pretty tight here. I love it. So I would definitely check out Mark Jeff for you guys.
Awesome.
Dude,
this is absolutely incredible.
I can't explain.
I did not,
I had no idea.
I had no idea.
I came into this rush.
I mean,
I looked a little into towel,
you know,
but there's a,
you know,
it's like,
I'm so,
we're all so busy in our own layer one.
You know what I mean?
There's so much work to be done.
I'm constantly like talking about Thor chain,
keeping up with the latest information. There's just, it's just, you're, you can literally
not pay attention to all the ecosystems. You just don't have enough bandwidth as a human being.
Even using AI tooling, I've tried, it's just not possible for me. Um, so I am so glad we had this
conversation to give people a sense of just what Tao is doing. I mean, I think that's right. I think
Bitcoin just burning energy,
just trying to like guess a random number,
that's such wasted potential.
And that's no shade against them.
Bitcoin was the first major, right?
I mean, things iterate, things improve,
you get new ideas.
I mean, it's like the first light bulb, right?
There's always going to be improvement.
Absolutely.
But it just seems like such a great idea to take that to make it
programmable the mining programmable and to make functionality out of it i mean yeah whoo that's a
big deal i i it's got my wheels turning mark i am pumped up right now that's the way i felt too
yeah yeah i'm glad you're excited kenton we we need to add Tau to Thorchain, Kenton.
I think so too. Yeah. I'm sold.
Yeah, no, this was great doing this podcast with us, Mark,
is that it helps our community, you know, hear from you,
hear the story, the pitch to kind of rally our troops
and get momentum within the Thorchain community, get things done.
And so, you know, hopefully we can make this happen.
Mark, is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven't discussed?
You know, the floor is yours.
Any subject or topics you want to get into?
I think I'm good.
I think I got out what I wanted to get out today.
And I'm glad you guys are excited and i think we uh i think we explained it to your your crowd and
you know obviously i'm a big thor thor chain uh thor chad as we say from back in the day so yeah
yeah no good meetings of the mind absolutely awesome yes and and what kenton said earlier
you know like thor chain god let me reach out to the Tau community
who's listening. Let's talk about ThorChain for just a second.
ThorChain is 700,000 lines
of code now. I think even more than that.
This is so unbelievably complicated
to go to Layer 1 to Layer 1.
But we've never skimmed out on the first principle.
So if Tau was on ThorChain,
it is no KYC, it is permissionless
decentralized access to Layer 1,
and we will die on that hill.
We will die on that hill. This is going to be a free and open, neutral economic infrastructure.
Our goal is to liberate the world, bar none, and Tau is doing something very important,
where they are solving real-world problems, using basically a fork conceptually of Bitcoin.
You guys are moving the needle in a really dramatic forward. This is a match made in heaven.
Mark, I'm going to be a strong advert for Tau.
I want it on Thor Chain.
It's an asset that I think we absolutely must support.
This is absolutely incredible.
My God, man.
I had no idea.
I had no idea.
And I debate with myself, Mark.
I say, should I really do the deep dive into Tau?
Or should I, like, come on.
Like, do a little dive, but then but then like have a genuine reaction right and i'm so glad i didn't do the
deep dive on this one i want i want to learn because because you know because if i learn all
this stuff like i have to fake the emotion like wow tau's so cool you know no this is legit like
my wheels are getting blown off my my freaking brain in real time go ahead i do have a
question um you mentioned that wallets for tau is there like a standout one kind of like a metamask
of towel like with the main yeah there's there's two that i really like there's one called if you
go to tau.com um that is a really great phone you, basically a phone app wallet. And that is actually excellent.
And then I like Crucible.
Crucible is the Chrome plugin that works with Ledger.
Yeah, so there's the tau.com wallet.
This is like a very easy to use wallet.
It's incredibly consumer simple.
And basically you can stake subnets.
You can stake tau for subnet tokens directly in the wallet.
So it just interacts with the chain, right?
You don't have to go to another site with the wallet.
You can just do it inside the wallet, right?
The wallet's got the exchange built into it.
Wow.
So, yeah, so super cool.
And it's only iOS right now, but it looks like Android's coming soon.
Correct.
Yeah, so that's awesome.
Very cool.
Crucible is what we would have to support on the front end.
Yeah, sorry.
So Crucible's got a Chrome plug-in, and I think it's crucible.ai, I think is the site.
So there's that.
and then there's also tau stats tau stats is the sort of one of the major um if not the major um
And then there's also TauStats.
uh block explorer effectively it does a lot more than that but but sort of to put it in terms of
other blockchains it would be the prime block explorer um plus now they have a wallet which
i have not used that wallet yet i've used these these two wallets. I love both of these.
And I just haven't had time to go check out their wallet because it's only like a week and a half old.
But they also apparently have a very good Chrome plug-in wallet.
Okay.
So there's three entrants now that are pretty good.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm trying to find the Crucible.ai.
I'm getting some different results. I don't want to put up a scam site until let me know oh sorry cruciblelabs.com that's okay okay crucible labs
cruciblelabs.com you said yep okay let me find it here got you i got it all right let me let me
stop this bring it up i want i want to make sure everyone can see this stuff yeah crucible labs
yes there we go boom built for pit pit tensor there you go perfect guys crucible labs all one
word.com crucible labs all one word.com you guys very cool uh thor chad's out there get involved
in tow check it out i mean this is really stuff, you guys. They take the time to reach out to us. They've been a long time
supporter and believer in Thorchain.
very, very patient with us, because
this has been a journey for Thorchain. Figuring out
this cross-chain layer one stuff has
been really, really hard. We owe it
to them to support them as well, because they have supported
us 100%.
Absolutely badass, Mark. You're a badass
dude, Mark. You know that? I'm not trying to kiss your ass, but you're a savage, mark you know that i'm not trying to kiss
your ass but you're you're a savage man i love it i and i only like talking to savages it's great
freaking cool dude happy to hear 100 yes absolutely um i think so i think so i'm my heart i'm getting
palpitations right now i'm getting a little palpitations you know i mean i need to drink
some more coffee to calm down.
uh, Mark,
real quick,
before we wrap it up,
is there anything else whatsoever you want to say?
Any outro at all before I,
before we do the outro here?
I'm good.
Thank you guys for having me.
I very much appreciate the invite and this has been fun.
Glad you guys.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
I broke up a little bit there.
If we get the, when we get the towel pool going
on Thor chain we'll have to have you back on
absolutely love to come back
yeah great yeah absolutely
or any updates whatsoever like something
really significant happens on towel let us know
man we can throw this together this has been
an absolutely banger live
stream okay you guys kind of staying
on my internet sorry sorry if i was a little
edgy there but you know sometimes the internet it's a little weird but you guys this has been
a legendary live stream please again follow at mark jeffrey on x absolutely a giga chad he is
a giga chad he's also a tau chad i don't know what you guys call yourself what do you guys call
yourself over there when the believers in tau yeah so lately the joke has arisen that we
should call ourselves the Taliban,
but I'm not quite sure if that's the right one.
I like it.
Yeah, I like it.
I don't care.
I don't care if that gets us on like 15 different lists.
The Taliban is joining the Thor Chats.
I don't care.
That's awesome.
I think we can maybe come up with another one,
but it is pretty funny.
That's badass. I don't know. I'm kind of sold on that. another one, but it is pretty funny. That's badass.
I don't know.
I'm kind of sold on that.
It's hilarious.
Okay, you guys.
Always a quick reminder, you guys,
if you want to become a node operator on ThorChain,
and if we add Tau, it might be really lucrative.
I'm just saying, reach out to at Runtard on Twitter.
He can help you get set up and find bond providers.
You guys, I know these live streams really go the difference.
If you want an efficient way to get the TLDR on these,
follow at Ray Analytics on X,
at Ray N-A-L-Y-T-I-C-S on X, you guys.
He does the written recaps.
They're so helpful to get the latest.
And always remember, you guys,
the views expressed are solely those of the hosts and guests.
Any action taken based on this information
is at your own risk.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
But I'm a bullish, I'm always bullish on the future, baby.
That's how I am because of people like Mark.
I'm just going to say, you guys,
check out Steelcore Capital.
All you accredited investors out there,
I think it's worthy of your time.
Mark, thank you so much, man.
I hope you have a wonderful day, and I hope everyone watching this has a wonderful day as well.
Take care, guys.
Bye, everybody.
Bye, Mark.
