The infrastructure that underpins global computing is undergoing massive change. True computing power no longer belongs in isolated corporate data centers, but in open global networks.
Speaking at Proof of conversation summit in Paris, Bittensor co-founder and Crucible Labs partner Ala Shaabana highlighted the stunning mathematics behind decentralized networks. To show the audience what distributed computing can do, he compared the Bitcoin network to traditional enterprise setups.
“We all know that Bitcoin really eclipses the top 100 supercomputers,” Shaabana said. “Does anyone know, in comparison, what the hash rate is? It’s over 600,000 times the power of what these supercomputers can actually do. And it’s definitely Bitcoin.”
To understand Shaabana’s comment, it helps to know what Bittensor actually is.
It is a layer 1 protocol built on the same codebase philosophy as Bitcoin: a hard cap of 21 million tokens, hard-coded halvings in predetermined blocks, no pre-mining and no venture capital. Bittensor is a decentralized network that replaces Bitcoin hash puzzle mining with artificial intelligence execution and validation.
The same incentive architecture that transformed Bitcoin into a computing force 600,000 times more powerful than the world’s best supercomputers is redirected by Bittensor to AI, organized into 128 specialized problem-solving networks called subnetworks. Each subnet sets its own goal, and miners compete for TAO token rewards by achieving it, meaning the network’s intelligence is entirely shaped by what it chooses to reward. This design principle, borrowed directly from the Bitcoin playbook, is the foundation of everything Shaabana argues below.
Change in the long-term bullish case
The fundamental logic of Shaabana is simple: if coordination and code could create the world’s most powerful financial computing engine, the same model could be applied to AI. By breaking a network into 128 individual problem-solving neighborhoods or subnetworks, developers can source hardware and intelligence on a global scale without a central technology monopoly.
The trick to making a distributed system work is all about designing incentives. “Show me the subnet and I’ll tell you what the miners are optimizing for,” Shaabens said, adapting a famous stock quote. If you reward participants for their raw computing speed, they optimize for speed. If you reward them for storing data, they optimize the storage.
By setting these programmatic goals, open networks naturally attract talent and computing power much more effectively than standard companies.
“The long-term bullish scenario is no longer primarily technological,” Shaabana concluded. “This is driven by debt, liquidity and loss of trust in traditional sovereign systems. Subnetworks actually create markets. Intelligence is no longer locked behind organizational questions; signals will define the truth and performance is truly rewarded.”
