Dear Bittensor TAO crypto holders, if you're researching or holding the Bittensor TAO token, this is going to be an incredibly helpful read for you. I'm big into AI projects and the future of building AI that we can actually use and have ownership of as humans. I've researched the Bittensor TAO project along with thousands of other cryptos, and I care about your success as a crypto investor and want to make sure you have the best opportunities. This is not financial advice. I do hold tens of thousands of ICP, Internet Computer Protocol, but I only hold it because it has the only real technology I see that can actually make putting AI into the hands of us as users. It does that by putting everything fully on chain.
Many of you in the ICP community have asked me, well, what about Bittensor TAO? Doesn't that look great? You've got high profile people promoting it. From what I see, I see nothing to be excited about with the Bittensor TAO project. I encourage you to look this stuff up yourself the way I have.
The supply and token distribution problems
There are a ton of problems I see with Bittensor TAO. The first is the low amount of circulating supply, which is the amount that's tradable on exchanges, versus the high amount that's still in the hands of insiders. On Internet Computer alone, token dumping was a massive part of the price depreciation, and that's the project I consider to have the best technology in crypto. With Bittensor TAO, what I see is that this constant token dumping is going to guarantee, in most scenarios, that things don't go well.
On top of that, there's unclear token distribution. For the first couple of years of the project there was a bunch of mining, millions of tokens mined, but we have no idea who those went to. To make things even worse, there's now an upgrade where subnets can issue their own tokens, which means some people are saying this is a mechanism for insiders to simply be able to exit.
Where is the real utility?
This gets even worse when you explore the real utility of the token. This is the thing that crypto investors are not nearly investigating enough: how much real utility can the token actually have? Right now, with Internet Computer Protocol, for example, you can use the token to stake and participate in fully on-chain governance. You can send the token for transactions and swap it just like you can on most other blockchains with smart contracts. And you can burn the Internet Computer Protocol token to get cycles, which can then be burned to pay for AI models that run fully on-chain.
When I compare that to Bittensor TAO, I see very little real utility that the token appears to have, especially because of what I see as a lack of true decentralization. While the Bittensor TAO team will talk to you about their decentralized AI network, I don't see that this is actually running on a provably decentralized network the way Internet Computer is, where you can see the nodes distributed all over the world, and you can see transparently the exact process to onboard nodes, to reward nodes, and to keep nodes.
What I believe is that Bittensor's resources are actually running on centralized cloud servers, and it's up to them to prove they're not. It's very easy to run a bunch of computation on a centralized cloud service. It's very difficult to set up a truly decentralized network, and the burden is on you if you're claiming it to prove it. I have not seen sufficient proof, and many others have not either.
You can't even train AI on it
Another huge problem: in all the conversations about AI with Bittensor, what I don't see is even being able to train real AI. The network is focused on inference using pre-trained models. Internet Computer Protocol is actually in a much better position for that, because if you already have pre-trained models like DeepSeek, you can put them on Internet Computer Protocol directly and then have transparency and verifiability of the data, which is huge.
By comparison, if you can't train the models with Bittensor, then there's no point in taking an already trained model, putting it on Bittensor, and trying to run that on their network when you can't get all the benefits of having everything 100% on chain like you can with Internet Computer Protocol. So I don't see why any developer who's aware of both of these mechanisms would build and do anything with Bittensor when ICP has vastly superior technology for using the same kinds of pre-trained AI models and then being able to put them in a fully secure, provably decentralized blockchain environment.
Do your own research and look for the criticisms
Meanwhile, there are so many more problems with this. What you can do is just go to something like Grok and ask for all the criticisms. I know that lots of times in life we get confirmation bias, where we make a decision that often wasn't well thought out, whether it's a one night stand to start a relationship or buying a cryptocurrency after seeing one video. I've done both. What I can say is the best things I've had in life were the ones where I did much more research before I put my money in, or anything else. I've done that research, and that's why I haven't invested in Bittensor TAO. There are so many more of these you can look up and read yourself.
This is not financial advice. I'm not telling you what to do with your money; I'm telling you what to do with your research. In my experience, you should be learning and looking for everything that's wrong with every crypto you might have in your portfolio. I've done entire videos on the most serious concerns I have for Internet Computer Protocol. If you're aware of all the criticisms and you're not shaken out, that's great. But when I keep looking at these for Bittensor, it's like you have no memory or learning continuity on Bittensor from what I see, and these things are crucial for advanced AI systems. On Internet Computer Protocol, you can do this, and you can do it all fully on-chain. I don't see where the value is in taking a pre-trained model and then not being able to continuously have it learn with each user.
The economics don't add up
The economic inefficiency of this is also massive. For decentralized AI model training, it's not nearly as efficient. You might as well train things on the centralized alternatives that already have the infrastructure set up, and then you can take that model and put it on ICP for the best experience. Meanwhile, with Bittensor, you're running these models against multiple nodes and offsetting that with token inflation, and on top of that there's a high cost of inference that some say is prohibitively expensive. So where is the real use of this protocol? On ICP, there are very clear use cases and provable, actual technology that real people are running real models on right now. And it's easier than ever. Arguably, it's easier to deploy an AI model on ICP than it is anywhere else.
When you compare ICP having a similar market cap with Bittensor TAO, you have to ask, who's actually using this? One of the big criticisms is a lack of clear use cases. Early subnets have been said to have been created just to earn TAO emissions rather than producing meaningful AI products, which is completely logical, isn't it? So the question is, where are the real world applications? On Internet Computer Protocol, you're seeing real world applications already, where people are building their own AI models, testing out things like DeepSeek on-chain, running AI agents, and doing things like Decide AI's facial recognition to stop bots from claiming airdrops. What real cases that are actually out there can use Bittensor? I've looked at the Bittensor website and ecosystem, and I don't see anything that's actually solving real problems. For as big a value as this project carries, that's huge.
Hype over substance
What I see is hype over substance. People have been speculating on this based on narratives rather than actually looking into the details of how the technology works and whether this is actually decentralized, which almost no AI projects are. Some people have called this a meme coin, and that's where I would put it too. This is basically a cult coin or a meme coin. When I first looked at the Bittensor TAO website about a year ago, it was incredibly simple. There was almost no substance. I am just blown away that people have bought this. But I'm guessing what's happened most of the time is that if you bought this, there's a good chance you haven't ever looked for the criticisms intentionally. Before I put a bunch of money in Internet Computer, I looked for as many criticisms as I could find on purpose, because I know if I'm going to get into something, I want to be very aware of what's wrong with it, what's screwed up about it, what doesn't work well, and what could go wrong.
Who is even running this project?
There's also regulatory uncertainty with the project. Anything intersecting blockchain and AI carries that regulatory uncertainty, especially because I have not been able to find almost anyone on the actual Bittensor team. One of the things claiming your project is decentralized lets many projects get away with is not putting their team out publicly. But when I'm buying something like Internet Computer Protocol, I can go to DFINITY.org and see the hundreds of people, the faces, and the names, and I can see them on the DFINITY YouTube channel doing talks. I can see the people I'm investing in, because ultimately buying tokens truly does come down to the people, just like buying stocks comes down to the actual people working at the company to use all the technology and resources. If you don't have people whose names you know, then I don't have any confidence in that.
Trust is incredibly important online for crypto projects. That means I want to see a lot of names and a lot of faces, or I'm not going to invest in it. That includes Bitcoin. One reason I do not invest in Bitcoin is that the founder is anonymous, and quite possibly the CIA. I'm not investing in something with an anonymous founder, because there's no transparency as to whether that wallet will move. And Bittensor TAO has, to me, that exact problem, except worse.
Invest in what you actually use
For non-technical users, which would be the masses, Bittensor is complicated. I don't believe in investing in anything I'm not using as a regular user myself. My OpenChat community, which I believe is far superior to Discord or Telegram, is fully on-chain, so I'm actually using the Internet Computer Blockchain every day as a non-technical user. There's a common sense investing thought I have loved ever since I heard it from Kyle Langham at DFINITY. He said that someone else originated it: if you use a company's product, then it makes sense to consider buying the stock. What's insane to me is people buying Bittensor TAO and other cryptos that they've never used themselves. I have an iPhone.
Why I Use These Companies but Don't Own Their Stock
I have a brand new iPhone 16. Before that I had an iPhone 8 that I held onto for something like eight years before I finally upgraded. I use Apple products across the board. I have an Apple laptop and an iPad. A lot of the gear in my home studio here I bought on Amazon, and I shop on Amazon every single week. I go to Whole Foods, which Amazon owns, and it happens to be right down the street from me. I've been a big-time Amazon customer for a decade.
Here's the part that surprises people: I don't hold any Amazon stock, and I don't hold any Apple stock either, even though I use the things I bought on Amazon and I shop there constantly. The reason is simple. I don't see how I'm going to get a great return on Amazon stock at this point. In my opinion, the company is already fairly valued, so I don't see why I would invest in it. Same thing with Apple. Apple is already one of the most valuable companies in the world, right alongside Amazon. I don't see why I would put money into that.
As an investor, I only want to invest in things that I believe are drastically undervalued. The question I always ask is whether the price gives me room to grow. With these giants, the answer is no. If anything, in my view, they're drastically overvalued. When I look closely, even when I just search and read through the criticisms, I don't find anything that genuinely impresses me. There's very little to offset that overvaluation except hype, speculation, and what feels to me almost like a cult coin.
Why I Make Videos Like This One
I've made this whole piece knowing that it does not pay. Content like this does not pay very well. What I care about is giving you information that, depending on how you process it, what you think about it, and the decisions you make, might truly save your portfolio. And I want to be clear: I wouldn't take any action immediately. Digest this. Think about it. Process it. This is my experience and my honest opinion, not a recommendation for what you should do with your own money.
Remember that I personally hold a lot of ICP, so I'm sharing where my own conviction sits. Remember that I've been in crypto for eleven years and I've researched thousands of altcoins. I've turned down huge amounts of money I could have been paid if I'd told you how great something was, or hyped up other cryptos like it, instead of telling you the truth: that I honestly don't find anything appealing about it. That's the standard I try to hold myself to, and you can find more of how I think about it in my Money playlist.
I'm a full-time YouTuber. I put out six pieces of content a day, covering everything from gaming to music, inspiration, real-life moments, crypto reviews, crypto hype breakdowns and tutorials, and videos for my fellow YouTubers. I do this full-time, and every day I hope what I make can make your life better.