What Is TAO, the Bittensor Token Causing Friction Between Barry Silbert and Bitcoiners?

TAO, the autochthonal token of AI-focused blockchain Bittensor, has been causing hostility connected X betwixt Digital Currency Group laminitis Barry Silbert and staunch supporters of bitcoin (BTC), the archetypal and largest cryptocurrency.

Author and bitcoin protagonist Parker Lewis called Silbert and Raoul Pal, the presenter of The Journey Man podcast, a radical of "affinity scammers" for promoting TAO connected a caller episode.

Silbert responded by writing: "calling $TAO a scam is specified a lazy attack. bash better"

Grayscale Investments, 1 of Digital Currency Group's subsidiaries, runs a Bittensor Trust that presently has astir $8 cardinal successful assets nether management. It besides has a spot bitcoin exchange-traded money (GBTC) with $16.6 cardinal nether absorption arsenic good arsenic a bitcoin mini spot ETF.

What is TAO?

Silbert sparked the bitcoiners' ire by comparing Bittensor to the Bitcoin blockchain.

"It's conscionable similar bitcoin, determination was a achromatic insubstantial that turned into codification past launched and it has the aforesaid token economics," helium said successful the podcast.

While determination are some similarities to BTC successful that TAO's proviso is capped astatine 21 cardinal tokens and it goes done artifact reward halving events, determination are besides stark differences successful presumption of the project's ethos and usage case.

Bittensor is simply a decentralized web that merges blockchain exertion with instrumentality learning. It was designed to go a peer-to-peer AI market, wherever users tin stock and monetize AI models.

Bitcoin was spawned retired of the Libertarian cypherpunk epoch and designed chiefly arsenic a peer-to-peer outgo method that avoided government-issued currency. In caller years has besides emerged a store of value, becoming a mainstay connected company equilibrium sheets to mitigate rising inflation.

The TAO token was released 2 years agone and has experienced utmost volatility, rising to supra $700 connected 2 occasions successful 2024 earlier cratering to astir $200 some times. It was trading precocious astir $339.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, has risen from $22,000 since the commencement of 2023 to arsenic precocious arsenic $109,000 successful January. While it's had its ups and downs, they're not arsenic marked arsenic the plunges typically seen crossed the altcoin market. Bitcoin is presently priced astir $90,000 with a marketplace headdress astir $1.8 trillion. TAO has a marketplace headdress astir $2.98 billion, according to information connected CoinMarketCap.