Bittensor creator Const on Affine, dTAO, "mining reasoning," and more | E2326

August 17, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Bittensor: A Permissionless Market for AI

When Jacob Steves—known in the crypto world as "Const" (short for Constantine)—started Bittensor, he was trying to solve a specific problem: how to connect the world's most powerful computational resource (the kind of permissionless mining network Bitcoin created) to the most important computational problem of the 21st century (artificial intelligence). The result is a network that treats AI capabilities—inference, training, even reasoning itself—as digital commodities that can be mined, verified, and traded, much like Bitcoin treats hashes.

The Bitcoin Blueprint, Adapted for AI

Bitcoin's core innovation wasn't just digital money. It was the creation of the first digital commodity—something computationally defined, mined by solving mathematical problems, and produced through a permissionless, hyper-competitive global market. Anyone anywhere could plug hardware into the wall and contribute. The result was the most efficient market in history for producing hashing power.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Why Bittensor Matters: From Bitcoin to Real-World AI** - Jason introduces the episode, stating he sees Bittensor as the second crypto project (after Bitcoin) that is "definitely not a scam" and solves real-world problems.
2 (03:49) **The Origin Story: Abstracting Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work for AI** - Const explains the foundational idea: take Bitcoin’s permissionless proof-of-work market and apply it to the most important computational problem of the 21st century—artificial intelligence.
3 (08:28) **Defining the Core: Permissionless & Peer-to-Peer** - Const and Jason break down the critical concepts of "permissionless" and "peer-to-peer" in plain English, explaining why they are the bedrock of the system.
4 (13:58) **The Mechanism: How a Subnet Works** - Const explains the core architecture of a Bittensor subnet as a "Premier League" for a specific AI task, complete with miners, validators, and a ranking system.
5 (21:08) **Subnets as Startups: Tokens, Liquidity, and Product-Market Fit** - The conversation shifts to how subnets function as independent projects with their own tokens (alpha tokens) that must prove real-world value to survive.
6 (27:52) **The Adversarial Reality: Building for Hackers and Nation-States** - Const reveals the intense adversarial nature of building on Bittensor, where the system must be designed to force even the worst actors to produce value.
7 (38:05) **dTAO: The Meta-Mechanism** - Const explains the "dynamic TAO" upgrade, which applies Bittensor's own mechanism to itself, creating a permissionless system for selecting the best subnets.

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Show Notes

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist

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Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist

Today's show:

We've been going deep on Bittensor and how it works all year on TWiST, meeting with the creators of some of our favorite subnets, and exploring how the system decentralizes inference, compute, and storage. Now, on this very special episode, Jason and Lon welcome Bittensor co-founder Jason Steeves (aka "Const") to the show.

He gives us a quick tour of the project's first principles, before diving into how subnets incentivize miners to contribute, how dTAO turned the creation of subnets into its own competition, how Const says he employs "the internal machinery of capitalism" to rank subnects, and his latest project, Subnet 120 (aka Affine).

Find out what the OpenTensor Foundation actually does, go inside the Templar controversy, and learn why Const is trying to make himself increasingly irrelevant.

Guest

Jacob Steeves on X: https://x.com/const_reborn

Bittensor: https://www.bittensor.com/

Affine: https://affine.io/

Relevant Links

Original Bittensor whitepaper: https://bittensor.com/whitepaper

Bittensor governance and documentation: https://www.bittensor.com/docs

Beginner's Guide to Dynamic TAO: https://www.tao.media/the-complete-beginners-guide-to-dynamic-tao-dtao/

Prime Intellect: TOPLOC: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/toploc

Engy (SN53): https://engy.ai/

Lium (SN51): https://www.lium.io

Targon (SN4): https://targon.com/