filkxs

This is WILD. Peter Thiel just bet $2 billion on a collar that wraps around a cow’s neck. The company is called Halter and it has a proprietary algorithm that runs the entire operation. They actually trademarked the name for it and called it the Cowgorithm and here's how it works. A farmer opens an app, taps a button, and 600,000 cows across three countries start walking toward the milking station on their own. No farm dogs, fences or physical labor, it's just a solar-powered GPS collar sending sound and vibration cues to each animal. The collar does more than move cows around. It monitors digestion, fertility cycles, and health patterns in real time, 24 hours a day, using machine learning trained on the behavior of hundreds of thousands of animals. Halter was founded by a rocket engineer who built spacecraft at Rocket Lab before deciding that farming was the bigger unsolved problem. US ranchers alone have already used the technology to build over 11,000 miles of virtual fencing, roughly the full perimeter of the continental United States, saving an estimated $220 million in physical fencing costs. Halter's previous funding round valued the company at $1 billion. This new round, led by Thiel's Founders Fund, doubles that valuation to $2 billion before the new money even hits the account. And they charge farmers between $5 and $8 per animal per month on a subscription model, meaning the more cows they collar, the more locked-in the revenue becomes. The most powerful venture capitalist on earth just decided that the future of food and farming runs through an algorithm named after a cow. He might be right.

Bittensor will be run by agents. They will feed the mining, resist the exploits, manage the fleets, build the subnets and consume the commodities

INSANE: 🇯🇵 Japan will classify Bitcoin as a financial product.

Show me one Bittensor "achievement" that works without $TAO inflation subsidy. I went through them. Here's what I found: 1. Chutes "85% cheaper than AWS" - Miners subsidize compute in exchange for TAO emissions. Not architectural efficiency. In February 2026 Chutes killed the free tier because specific users were consuming 100-324x their subscription value. Surprising when the subsidy ends. 2. Chutes "privacy and censorship resistance" - Miners receive your raw request in plaintext on their hardware. They can log everything. TEE is "in development." For any real enterprise use case this is a blocker, not a feature. Censorship-resistance is for people who can't pass KYC, not for B2B. 3. Chutes "adversarial validation" - Multiple miners cross-check each other's outputs. Sounds robust. In practice it's latency overhead on top of already slow decentralized routing. Fireworks delivers 0.17s TTFT. Chutes doesn't publish theirs. 4. Covenant-72B "first decentralized large model" - Underperforms LLaMA-2 on most benchmarks. LLaMA-2 came out nearly 3 years ago. LLaMA-3.3 70B was trained on 15T tokens, Covenant on 1.1T. Technically interesting experiment with SparseLoCo. Calling it a competitive product is dishonest. 5. Ridges "beat Claude on SWE-bench" - Not on the official swebench leaderboard. All numbers are self-reported by the team selling the SN62 subnet token. For context: open-source Live-SWE-agent on top of Claude Opus 4.5 scores 79.2% on Verified - one repo, one week of engineering, no blockchain. 6. Ridges "4% to 41% in one week breakthrough" - They started from zero with no proper prompting or scaffold. Decentralization didn't improve the model. They just correctly configured an agent framework on top of DeepSeek. Any ML engineer reproduces this in a few days. 7. Ridges "winner-takes-all competition" - Agents use DeepSeek and Llama through Chutes. Subnet 64 subsidy feeds Subnet 62 subsidy. One inflation finances another. The narrative calls this composability. The reality is circular subsidy. 8. Ridges benchmark overfitting - The team themselves admitted: when they added Polyglot alongside SWE-bench, score dropped from 88% to 17-18%. Recovered to 41% within weeks. Classic benchmark overfitting, not real agent improvement. Exactly why they're absent from official leaderboards. 9. Subnet validation problem - For code you can run tests. For the other 120+ subnets (text, analysis, predictions) - validators vote subjectively. This opens the door to validator collusion and score gaming. The core unsolved problem of the protocol that nobody talks about. 10. 2024 security breach - Real wallet exploit through vulnerability in Python package v6.12.2. Network went into safe-mode, transactions frozen. For "trustless permissionless infrastructure" - instructive. The only honest Bittensor thesis: token subsidy aggregates distributed GPUs cheaper than building a datacenter. Interesting bet that this advantage survives as emissions decline. Unproven so far. I'm explicitly not looking at price - I don't care if $TAO is $100 or $500. I'm asking about the product. But judging by the thousands of people tweeting about Bittensor right now - most of them are looking at exactly the price.