Bittensor (TAO) is still a young cryptocurrency that focuses on artificial intelligence. However, expert Eric Wall has examined the concept and comes to the conclusion that Bittensor is pure hype without any added value.
Crypto influencer Eric Wall is making headlines with a scathing analysis of Bittensor (TAO). Wall begins his criticism on X with the words: “The uselessness of TAO is truly spectacular.” Yet just over a year after its stock market debut, Bittensor has worked its way into the top 50 cryptocurrencies when Bitcoin and co. are ranked by market capitalization. Bittensor advertises the realization of artificial intelligence as crypto. But what does that look like in practice?
Wall took a closer look at TAO. Bittensor’s network consists of several different subnets and one of them offers to create texts. As with ChatGPT, users have to provide a prompt, i.e. a rough specification of the topic. Computers in the Bittensor subnet then begin to complete the task. They use widespread text programs such as Zephyr, which have often even been trained with ChatGPT. The shift towards a crypto solution at Bittensor is that TAOs are distributed as a reward for completing the text task with the help of artificial intelligence. Here, the bonus is then measured by how good the answer probably was. To measure this, Bittensor compares answers and classifies those that have many matches with other suggestions as good.
Bittensor goes round in circles around itself
Bittensor sells this approach as “decentralization”, writes Wall. But in practice, the miners prefer to copy answers from each other, says Wall, because this is the safest way to receive their TAO payouts – (almost) identical answers are automatically classified as helpful. As an example of how artificial intelligence is inflated by Bittensor, Wall gives the question “What is water?”. The answer will be “Water is a chemical compound with the molecular formula H2O” – which, incidentally, Wikipedia would also provide. At Bittensor, however, thousands of computers in the network have now received the question, copied the answer from each other and are collecting TAO.
The Bittensor concept is currently valued by the market at around 3.6 billion US dollars; the purpose of TAO is to be a means of payment for setting and solving tasks in the field of artificial intelligence. However, according to Wall, Bittensor does not even have a module for normal users to enter tasks. To put it plainly: anyone who has dealt with artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work knows and appreciates ChatGPT. If you wanted to use Bittensor as an alternative, you would first have to become a network participant with your own node. And Bittensor’s artificial intelligence responses are predictably similar to those of ChatGPT and are further smoothed out by the TAO reward system.
Conclusion: Bittensor seems to have a chip on its shoulder – buzzwords under the magnifying glass
Eric Wall has already been proven right in the past with warnings about cryptocurrencies such as Cardano (ADA) and IOTA, where he also contrasted advertising promises with reality. Now it was Bittensor’s turn, and in his assessment Wall uses expressions such as “idiotic buyers” and “sends TAO to zero”. After his test, he is sure that the real purpose of Bittensor is just to print crypto money and get rich with the buzzwords “artificial intelligence” and “decentralization”. ChatGPT could handle all tasks more efficiently than Bittensor because no pointless congruent multiple answers are produced.
TAO’s price curve, however, was little impressed by Wall’s fundamental criticism and is now trading at around 550 US dollars, up 10 percent on the day. This is reminiscent of other projects in crypto history which, with good timing and marketing, made a small circle of initiators rich and, in retrospect, were completely pointless and superfluous. Among investors looking for sustainable blockchain solutions, however, Bittensor has now been burned for the time being – perhaps future upgrades can still deliver added value for TAO.
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