Tao: The Bittensor Story and the Rise of Decentralized Intelligence (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798242924598)

Two engineers walked away from Google and academia with a dangerous idea: what if artificial intelligence didn't have to be controlled by anyone?

In 2021, Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana launched Bittensor - a decentralized network where anyone can contribute, evaluate, and earn from machine intelligence. No ICO. No venture capital tokens. No insider allocation. Just a fair launch, a whitepaper published under a pseudonym, and a bet that open markets could produce better AI than closed corporations.

They were almost right. They were also almost destroyed.

TAO tells the untold story of Bittensor - from its three failed mainnets to the cartel that tried to game its consensus, from the $8 million supply-chain heist that froze the blockchain to the moment a decentralized network trained a 72-billion-parameter language model that no single company owned. It's a story about cryptography, game theory, and the people who believe that the most powerful technology in history shouldn't be locked behind corporate walls.

This is the definitive narrative history of the project that Nvidia's CEO mentioned on a podcast, that Grayscale filed an ETF for, and that a growing community of over 100,000 participants is building into something that looks less like a cryptocurrency and more like a planetary brain.

Book Two of The Decentralized Revolution Series, from the author of ZERO: The Zcash Revolution.

For builders, holders, researchers, and anyone who believes intelligence should belong to everyone.

Author: Ryan Bethencourt
ISBN-13: 9798242924598
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 03/23/2026
Pages: 126
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.27d