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328 posts












$TAO Bons PONZI take. The work he didn't do. Claim: $328M in emissions vs $15M in revenue, economically bankrupt. This is wrong on the math, wrong on the mechanism, and wrong on what REVENUE even means in dTAO. Pull up taorevenue.com right now. Last 30 days alone: • 90,559 TAO ($22.4M) in on-chain inflow + burn • Annualized that's $270M flowing back to the protocol via inflows, buybacks, and burns • That's ONLY on-chain action. Off-chain revenue doesn't even count in this number Subnet owners are literally incentivized to buy back their own alpha with revenue, because more $TAO in the pool = more emissions. The mechanism itself is net $TAO flow from staking vs unstaking. To Build something that attracts and HOLDS stake CONVICTION. The design is behavioral incentivized real production. The mechanism is a closed economic loop, not a leak. Bons either doesn't understand dTAO or is pretending not to, not sure, hopefully many that don't understand it have another look. Claim: "Subnets aren't products, they exist to extract." Pull up taoflute.com. Look at the lines of code shipped per day per subnet. Real engineering. Real GitHub commits. Real models in production: • @AskVenice (1M+ paying users) trained Venice Uncensored 1.2 on @TargonCompute SN4 • @MacrocosmosAI just published ResBM 128x activation compression targeting a 70B distributed training run • @ridges_ai building autonomous software developers hitting top SWE-bench scores • @VantaTrading onboarded 5,500+ traders with zero marketing • @webuildscore raised vision accuracy to 95.8%, partnered with @PwC_France for enterprise physical AI • Templar trained Covenant-72B with 67.1 MMLU competitive with Llama 2 70B endorsed publicly by Jensen Huang and Chamath This is EXTRACTION? It's product-market fit being built in real time, on-chain, while the centralized AI world burns hundreds of billions in private. The macro context MANY ignore. This is what we should be talking about: • Big Tech capex on AI infrastructure in 2026: $660-690 billion • OpenAI infrastructure commitments alone: $1.4 trillion • Jensen Huang's estimate for total AI infra spend by end of decade: $3-4 trillion • Anthropic revenue scaled 100x in 2 years • 50% of all global VC in 2025 went to AI In the middle of the largest CLOSED UNVERIFIABLE capex buildout in human history, the open, permissionless, neutral substrate for AI compute and intelligence is supposedly worthless? Come On Be serious. The PONZI label gets thrown at every new monetary primitive in crypto: • Bitcoin was called a ponzi for 15 years • Ethereum was called a ponzi until ETFs hit • Solana was called a ponzi until institutional flows showed up • Now TAO is The Ponzi A ponzi has a central operator promising fixed returns, paying old investors with new money, and obscuring cashflows. But Bittensor has: • No central operator promising returns • Open-source emissions schedule on a 21M hard cap • Every reward, stake, burn, and buyback verifiable on-chain • Permissionless exit through AMM pools • A halving mechanism just like Bitcoin • Subnets that get pruned by the market when they fail That's not a ponzi. That's the most transparent capital allocation mechanism that has ever existed for AI. Grayscale didn't push their AI Fund $TAO allocation to 43% because they fell for a ponzi. Yuma didn't stake $691M into the network because they're confused. The real anti-crypto take is pretending every early-stage network has to look like a fully mature cash machine on day one or it is a scam. That is not how crypto works, networks work, OR markets work. Crypto deserves better. $TAO



Bittensor is a crypto-ponzi; unsustainable nonsense! TAO has no utility or PMF; it is all driven by token inflation: $328M worth of new tokens are printed annually, yet only $15M in annual revenue was generated! Subsidies from holders pay for subnets; economically bankrupt: 🧵 Token inflation is used to give people the illusion of low cost. As the truth is that creating AI models in a "decentralized" way is far more expensive. While offering no additional utility or benefits It is all theatre; subnets are not created as competitive products. They are created simply to exist & extract as much value out of TAO investors as possible Ponzinomics & Extraction: For example, the Pine Analytics data proved that unsubsidized inference on the Chutes subnet would cost up to 3.5x as much as centralized competitors such as Deepseek or TogetherAI! What makes it all so much worse is that token holders pay for these subnets through inflation. Yet, none of the revenue actually flows back to the token holders. The subnet owners get to keep 100% of the revenue! On top of 18% of emissions, just because... That is a borderline scam, extremely profitable for subnet operators, but setting up token investors for extreme loss when the system inevitably collapses As TAO has a 21M supply limit, which might be appealing to ignorant token investors. But also implies that the network will entirely collapse, as it is fundamentally unsustainable, just like BTC Inefficient & Expensive: The problems run even deeper than that, as is the case with most DePin projects that rely on subsidies rather than real-world value accrual: The reason why decentralized computing is so inefficient is that it requires verification & replication. Within a trustless environment, we cannot simply trust the work done by individual nodes. Instead, the work must be replicated multiple times over, introducing extreme inefficiencies. This is not so bad for simple TX's, but for serious, large computing tasks, this becomes a deal breaker This is why 41% of the rewards go to "validators" whose sole task is to verify that the work being done is legitimate! This only adds to the massive inefficiency already introduced by latency within a distributed network. There are several good reasons why AIs are trained in massive data centers with cards equipped with extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth connections. Something TAO is unable to directly compete with in technical & economic terms Product Theatre: In some cases, it is worth paying a premium for decentralization; one example of this is decentralized storage However, this is not the case for the training of AI's, as this is a one-off cost usually carried out by a centralized for-profit organization. As running the AI itself is much cheaper & even achievable by individuals on a single consumer-grade machine... So, what is the incentive for this centralized organization to use a more expensive method? That does not even result in a commercially viable product, due to the lack of scale... The answer is that there is no legitimate incentive! As there are only so many people they can fool into such a ponzinomic scheme, creating an upper bound on the size these subnets can grow to, which is nowhere near what large centralized AI companies can achieve today Conclusion: There is no future in such a bankrupt design! It is all theatre to extract as much as possible; subnets are not created as competitive products. They are created simply to exist & to extract as much value out of token investors as possible! There is much I did not cover in this critique, including "decentralization theatre", modularity, bad governance, perverse incentives & terrible UX. This critique was purely economic, which is bad enough to reject TAO on that basis alone! As value investors, we have to avoid such nonsense. It is not only dangerous from an investment perspective, but it also harms the industry as a whole. The more we prop up nonsense like this, the more difficult it will be for outsiders to take our industry seriously That is why we must speak out, as we care about crypto's ultimate goals. Financial freedom, censorship resistance, privacy & more Reject the nonsense, as the numbers & facts speak for themselves. Crypto already presents us with such a beautiful dream for the future; let's not spoil our opportunity by wasting our energy on half-baked ideas like TAO Crypto deserves better than that. So, help us spread this message far & wide. As the truth will set us free! 🔥



Bittensor is a crypto-ponzi; unsustainable nonsense! TAO has no utility or PMF; it is all driven by token inflation: $328M worth of new tokens are printed annually, yet only $15M in annual revenue was generated! Subsidies from holders pay for subnets; economically bankrupt: 🧵 Token inflation is used to give people the illusion of low cost. As the truth is that creating AI models in a "decentralized" way is far more expensive. While offering no additional utility or benefits It is all theatre; subnets are not created as competitive products. They are created simply to exist & extract as much value out of TAO investors as possible Ponzinomics & Extraction: For example, the Pine Analytics data proved that unsubsidized inference on the Chutes subnet would cost up to 3.5x as much as centralized competitors such as Deepseek or TogetherAI! What makes it all so much worse is that token holders pay for these subnets through inflation. Yet, none of the revenue actually flows back to the token holders. The subnet owners get to keep 100% of the revenue! On top of 18% of emissions, just because... That is a borderline scam, extremely profitable for subnet operators, but setting up token investors for extreme loss when the system inevitably collapses As TAO has a 21M supply limit, which might be appealing to ignorant token investors. But also implies that the network will entirely collapse, as it is fundamentally unsustainable, just like BTC Inefficient & Expensive: The problems run even deeper than that, as is the case with most DePin projects that rely on subsidies rather than real-world value accrual: The reason why decentralized computing is so inefficient is that it requires verification & replication. Within a trustless environment, we cannot simply trust the work done by individual nodes. Instead, the work must be replicated multiple times over, introducing extreme inefficiencies. This is not so bad for simple TX's, but for serious, large computing tasks, this becomes a deal breaker This is why 41% of the rewards go to "validators" whose sole task is to verify that the work being done is legitimate! This only adds to the massive inefficiency already introduced by latency within a distributed network. There are several good reasons why AIs are trained in massive data centers with cards equipped with extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth connections. Something TAO is unable to directly compete with in technical & economic terms Product Theatre: In some cases, it is worth paying a premium for decentralization; one example of this is decentralized storage However, this is not the case for the training of AI's, as this is a one-off cost usually carried out by a centralized for-profit organization. As running the AI itself is much cheaper & even achievable by individuals on a single consumer-grade machine... So, what is the incentive for this centralized organization to use a more expensive method? That does not even result in a commercially viable product, due to the lack of scale... The answer is that there is no legitimate incentive! As there are only so many people they can fool into such a ponzinomic scheme, creating an upper bound on the size these subnets can grow to, which is nowhere near what large centralized AI companies can achieve today Conclusion: There is no future in such a bankrupt design! It is all theatre to extract as much as possible; subnets are not created as competitive products. They are created simply to exist & to extract as much value out of token investors as possible! There is much I did not cover in this critique, including "decentralization theatre", modularity, bad governance, perverse incentives & terrible UX. This critique was purely economic, which is bad enough to reject TAO on that basis alone! As value investors, we have to avoid such nonsense. It is not only dangerous from an investment perspective, but it also harms the industry as a whole. The more we prop up nonsense like this, the more difficult it will be for outsiders to take our industry seriously That is why we must speak out, as we care about crypto's ultimate goals. Financial freedom, censorship resistance, privacy & more Reject the nonsense, as the numbers & facts speak for themselves. Crypto already presents us with such a beautiful dream for the future; let's not spoil our opportunity by wasting our energy on half-baked ideas like TAO Crypto deserves better than that. So, help us spread this message far & wide. As the truth will set us free! 🔥



The past few weeks, people have been calling $TAO a scam and a rugpull. Completely low credits to a great protocol in the AI <> #Crypto sector. Sure, things can go wrong, and things can go to zero, especially in the tech industry. However, given the constant growth of the subnets and the ecosystem as whole, the resilience and fast response after the event took place. It's actually showing more strength than I would have expected it to do.












