The infrastructure that supports global computing is undergoing enormous change. True computing power no longer belongs to isolated corporate data centers, but to open global networks.
Speaking in the conversation test At the summit in Paris, Bittensor co-founder and Crucible Labs partner Ala Shaabana highlighted the amazing 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 dwarfs 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 that’s, actually, 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 limit of 21 million tokens, halvings hard-coded into predetermined blocks, no pre-mining, and no venture capital. Bittensor is a decentralized network that replaces Bitcoin hash puzzle mining with artificial intelligence in execution and validation.
Bittensor redirects the same incentive architecture that made Bitcoin a computing force 600,000 times more powerful than the world’s leading supercomputers toward AI, organized into 128 specialized problem-solving networks called subnets. Each subnetwork defines its own goal and miners compete for TAO token rewards upon reaching it, meaning the intelligence of the network is determined entirely by what it chooses to reward. That design principle, taken directly from the Bitcoin playbook, is the basis for everything Shaabana argues below.
Change in long-term bullish case
Shaabana’s core logic is simple: if coordination and code could create the world’s most powerful financial computing engine, the exact same model can be applied to AI. By dividing a network into 128 neighborhoods or individual subnetworks for problem solving, developers can gain global hardware and intelligence without a central technology monopoly.
The trick to making a distributed system work depends entirely on the design of incentives. “Show me the subnet and I’ll tell you what the miners are optimizing for,” Shaabens said, adapting a famous quote from the market. If you reward participants for raw calculation speed, they will optimize for speed. If you reward them for data storage, they optimize the storage.
By setting these programmatic goals, open networks naturally attract talent and computing power much more efficiently than standard corporations.
“The long-term bullish stance is no longer primarily technological,” Shaabana concluded. “It is driven by debt, liquidity, and declining trust in traditional sovereign systems. Subnetworks truly create markets. Intelligence is no longer locked behind organizational issues; signals will define the truth, and performance is truly rewarded.”
