Bittensor and Bitcoin

Bittensor borrows much of its design from Bitcoin.

Both have a fixed supply of 21 million tokens. Both create new tokens with every block and pay them to miners. Both cut the rate of new tokens in half over time, so the supply approaches its limit more and more slowly.

The big difference is what miners do. Bitcoin miners race to solve a puzzle. The work secures Bitcoin, but the answers have no other use. Bittensor miners do work someone can use, such as renting out computing power, running models or making forecasts, and validators judge how good it is.

There are smaller differences too. Bitcoin adds a block about every 10 minutes and halves every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years. Bittensor adds a block every 12 seconds and halves when the total issued crosses set amounts. And in Bitcoin, mining is what secures the chain. In Bittensor, miners do not produce blocks.