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

TAO has a 21 million fixed token supply and goes through block reward halvings, like BTC. TAO, the native token of AI-focused blockchain Bittensor, has been causing tension on X between Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert and staunch supporters of bitcoin (BTC), the original and largest cryptocurrency. Author and bitcoin supporter Parker Lewis called Silbert and Raoul Pal, the presenter of The Journey Man podcast, a group of "affinity scammers" for promoting TAO on a recent episode. Silbert responded by writing: "calling $TAO a scam is such a lazy attack. do better" Grayscale Investments, one of Digital Currency Group's subsidiaries, runs a Bittensor Trust that currently has around $8 million in assets under management. It also has a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (GBTC) with $16.6 billion under management as well as a bitcoin mini trust ETF. Silbert sparked the bitcoiners' ire by comparing Bittensor to the Bitcoin blockchain. "It's just like bitcoin, there was a white paper that turned into code then launched and it has the same token economics," he said in the podcast. While there are some similarities to BTC in that TAO's supply is capped at 21 million tokens and it goes through block reward halving events, there are also stark differences in terms of the project's ethos and use case. Bittensor is a decentralized network that merges blockchain technology with machine learning. It was designed to become a peer-to-peer AI market, where users can share and monetize AI models. Bitcoin was spawned out of the Libertarian cypherpunk era and designed primarily as a peer-to-peer payment method that avoided government-issued currency. In recent years has also emerged a store of value, becoming a mainstay on company balance sheets to mitigate rising inflation. The TAO token was released two years ago and has experienced extreme volatility, rising to above $700 on two occasions in 2024 before cratering to around $200 both times. It was trading recently around $339. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has risen from $22,000 since the start of 2023 to as high as $109,000 in January. While it's had its ups and downs, they're not as marked as the plunges typically seen across the altcoin market. Bitcoin is currently priced around $90,000 with a market cap about $1.8 trillion. TAO has a market cap around $2.98 billion, according to data on CoinMarketCap. Oliver Knight is the co-leader of CoinDesk data tokens and data team. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022 Oliver spent three years as the chief reporter at Coin Rivet. He first started investing in bitcoin in 2013 and spent a period of his career working at a market making firm in the UK. He does not currently have any crypto holdings. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/04/22/what-is-tao-the-bittensor-token-causing-friction-between-barry-silbert-and-bitcoiners #crypto #bitcoin #ethereum #cryptocurrency #news #blockchain #litecoin #cryptonews #cryptonewstoday #cryptoworld #cryptonewstoday ***NOT FINANCIAL, LEGAL, OR TAX ADVICE! JUST OPINION! I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I DO NOT GUARANTEE A PARTICULAR OUTCOME I HAVE NO INSIDE KNOWLEDGE! YOU NEED TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS! THIS IS JUST ENTERTAINMENT! This information is what was found publicly on the internet. This information could’ve been doctored or misrepresented by the internet. All information is meant for public awareness and is public domain. This information is not intended to slander harm or defame any of the actors involved but to show what was said through their social media accounts. Please take this information and do your own research. bitcoin, blockchain, crypto, cryptocurrency, altcoin, investment, ethereum, bitcoin crash, xrp, cardano, ripple