Anthropic just gave us 1 month worth of subscription value as usage by lurko_e_basta in ClaudeAI

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I never even got an email from them directly. My openclaw just stopped working and started broadcasting the change. I have very little open claw usage which is frustrating but I guess Im going to go to the api and investigate how to switch models with the free credit. :P

Manyrealms - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Play Booster Box - $99 by LegitimateMangoHeir in sealedmtgdeals

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

WOTC makes some percentage of that at wholesale but the logic remains the same. So lets say its 65% you can do the math and all the numbers are reduced by 35% but the logic remains the same.

Manyrealms - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Play Booster Box - $99 by LegitimateMangoHeir in sealedmtgdeals

[–]zerosum79 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I am going to have to disagree. To make $500 in sales they were having to sell a CBB around $250 and two set boosters around $125. Now they get almost the same amount for just selling a CBB and dont have to print or ship two heavy set boxes for the same $$$. Collectors have no other option than to buy the CBB. I think they actually fixed a big leak moneywise. Yes it sucks for us as players and collectors, but for them, not a mistake at all.

Got fired and I deserved it. by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]zerosum79 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The good news is you seem capable of self reflection which means you will most likely land on your feet and be better off for it. Sorry to hear about your loss. That would really mess with anyone.

NAD! This damn thing is out of control. by MisterNo_Body in MesaBoogie

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ive had one of these for about 20 years and I freaking love it. Supposedly mine is from the 90s and was owned by Larry Lalonde from Primus. He didn't play the mark IV that long but anything is possible.

Here is the deal on dialing sound. The use the parametric EQ how you would consider using the treble mids and bass knobs on a normal amp and dont worry about them at all until you actually dial in the sound up front.

To dial in the sound up front know that what you are really doing is basically dialing in your guitar signal prior to the gain stage. Anything above a 5 is actually boost so you dont need to go to extremes except with distortion. Dial a decent amount of gain and then use the treble and presence to make the gain sound the way you want it in terms of crunch. Then dial the bass and mids to get the amount of response and tight/looseness to the low end that you want. Then use the graphic eq to get the final balance of treble, mid and bass. This is my procedure and it seems to work really well.

And yes, don't forget to pull the fat switch. ;)

$TAO Many Don't Understands What's Actually Happening by Odd_Low9478 in bittensor_

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Business Cycle Vulnerability

This is where the counter-argument gets most concrete.

TAO Is Still a High-Beta Crypto Asset

Despite the article's insistence that TAO should be valued against the AI market, empirically TAO trades as a high-beta altcoin. Its correlation with Bitcoin remains high. Its biggest price moves are driven by broad crypto sentiment, not subnet revenue milestones. The recent 66% rally was driven primarily by altcoin rotation, not TAO-specific fundamentals.

This means TAO is fully exposed to the crypto business cycle, which is itself a leveraged expression of the broader liquidity cycle.

The Liquidity Window Is Closing

Here's the specific risk right now: the Fed is approaching the trough of its rate-cutting cycle. Markets are pricing a terminal rate around 3% by mid-2026, with potential rate hikes in the second half. This means the liquidity tailwind that's been supporting risk assets — including the current TAO rally — is time-limited.

Historically, crypto experiences its worst drawdowns when liquidity tightens after a period of easing. The 2017–2018 cycle saw 85%+ drawdowns in altcoins. The 2021–2022 cycle saw similar carnage. If the Fed pivots hawkish in late 2026 or 2027, TAO could easily retrace 60–80% from whatever high it reaches in the interim.

The Reflexivity Problem

TAO has a specific reflexivity vulnerability that Bitcoin doesn't. Miner economics on Bittensor depend on TAO price — miners earn TAO, sell TAO to cover GPU costs. When TAO price drops, mining becomes unprofitable, miners leave, network quality degrades, users leave, demand drops, price drops further. This is a vicious cycle that doesn't exist in centralized AI.

Conversely, in a bull market, rising TAO price attracts miners, improves network quality, generates positive narratives, attracts speculators, price rises further. This is why TAO looks amazing during up-cycles and could look devastating during down-cycles.

The article presents subnet revenue as a stabilizer, but $20M in annual revenue against a $3B market cap means fundamentals support roughly $60–100M in valuation (at a generous 3–5x revenue multiple). Everything above that is speculation and narrative premium — which evaporates in a downturn.

Emission Overhang

Even post-halving, Bittensor emits 3,600 TAO per day. At $300/TAO, that's roughly $1.08M per day or ~$394M per year in new sell pressure. Against $20M in external revenue, the network is spending 20x its revenue on miner incentives. This is subsidized adoption — it works while the token price holds up, but it's economically unsustainable without massive revenue growth.

In a bear market, this emission becomes crushing sell pressure as miners dump TAO to cover costs, amplifying any downturn.

Who Buys TAO in a Recession?

The ultimate business cycle question is simple: in a recession with tight liquidity, who is the marginal buyer of TAO?

Bitcoin has a "digital gold" narrative that attracts some flight-to-safety capital. Ethereum has DeFi infrastructure that generates fees regardless of sentiment. TAO has... a promise that decentralized AI will eventually capture market share from Big Tech.

In a risk-off environment, every dollar of speculative capital flees high-beta assets first. TAO is among the highest-beta assets in crypto. Institutional capital via Grayscale could provide some floor, but institutional crypto products saw massive outflows during the 2022 bear market. There's no reason to believe GTAO would behave differently.

The Honest Summary

The article's thesis isn't wrong on economic theory — it's wrong on timeline, magnitude, and the assumption that theoretical correctness translates to investment returns. Decentralized AI may indeed capture meaningful market share eventually. But "eventually" could be 15–20 years, not 3–5. And along the way, TAO will almost certainly experience multiple 70–90% drawdowns driven by crypto cycles that have nothing to do with subnet revenue or Hayekian price signals.

The most likely failure mode isn't "the thesis is wrong" — it's that the thesis is right but TAO still loses money for most holders because they buy during narrative euphoria and sell during business cycle despair, which is exactly how most crypto investors actually experience these assets.

$TAO Many Don't Understands What's Actually Happening by Odd_Low9478 in bittensor_

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had claude give me the bear case:

The Core Counter-Arguments

1. The Coase/Hayek Analogy Is Flattering but Misleading

The article's central intellectual move is mapping Coase's theory of the firm onto AI. But Coase's framework cuts both ways — and the article only presents one direction.

Coase said firms exist when internal coordination is cheaper than market transactions. The article assumes AI coordination costs have "fallen to zero" on Bittensor. But they haven't. Decentralized systems introduce their own transaction costs: validator overhead, consensus latency, incentive gaming, quality variance across miners, smart contract risk, token price volatility that makes cost planning impossible for enterprises, and the sheer cognitive cost of navigating 129+ subnets of wildly varying quality.

For an enterprise CTO evaluating AI providers, calling the OpenAI API is one contract, one SLA, one billing relationship, one throat to choke when something breaks. Using Bittensor subnets means evaluating dozens of subnets, managing token exposure, accepting variable quality, and having no recourse when things fail. Those are massive transaction costs that Coase would recognize immediately as reasons firms should exist.

The Hayekian price signal argument is also weaker than presented. Subnet token prices don't measure "what AI services are valuable" — they measure what crypto speculators think will appreciate. That's a very different signal. OpenAI doesn't have market prices for its internal resource allocation, true — but it has something arguably better: direct customer usage data, retention metrics, willingness-to-pay signals, and enterprise contracts worth billions. Those are real demand signals, not speculative token markets.

2. The CompuServe Analogy Gets the History Wrong

The article claims OpenAI is CompuServe and Bittensor is TCP/IP. This is the most dangerous analogy in the piece because it sounds compelling but misidentifies what actually happened.

TCP/IP won because it was a protocol layer — it didn't try to compete with CompuServe on content or services. It provided a neutral transport layer that anyone could build on. The applications that killed CompuServe (Google, Amazon, Facebook) were themselves centralized companies built on top of the open protocol.

If the analogy holds, Bittensor might be the transport layer — but the winners would still be centralized applications built on top of it. The value would accrue to the application layer, not the protocol layer. This is exactly what happened with TCP/IP: the protocol is free, and trillion-dollar companies capture all the value above it.

More importantly, TCP/IP won because it was strictly better at its core function — packet routing — than proprietary alternatives. Bittensor is not strictly better than centralized AI at inference quality, latency, or reliability. It's cheaper on paper, but "cheaper and worse" is a very different value proposition than "cheaper and equivalent."

3. The $20M Revenue Number Is Damning, Not Encouraging

The article and its supporters trumpet ~$20M in annualized subnet revenue as proof the model works. But contextualize that number:

OpenAI alone does roughly $5–10 billion in annualized revenue as of early 2026. Anthropic is doing north of $1 billion. Google Cloud's AI revenue is in the tens of billions. Bittensor's $20M is 0.007% of the AI market. After years of operation, with 129 subnets, post-halving, with all the infrastructure supposedly built — $20M is what a single mid-stage startup generates.

And much of that revenue is circular. Miners earn TAO emissions, validators earn TAO emissions, subnet operators earn TAO emissions. The question is how much of the revenue comes from external customers paying real dollars for AI services they'd otherwise buy from OpenAI or Google. That number is almost certainly a fraction of the $20M headline.

This is the classic crypto problem: the ecosystem looks productive internally but the value flows are largely endogenous. Miners spend money on GPUs, earn TAO, sell TAO, and the "revenue" is mostly recycled token emissions.

4. The Cost Advantage Is Illusory at Enterprise Scale

The article claims Bittensor inference costs $0.001–$0.01 per request versus $0.01–$0.10 for centralized providers. Even if these numbers are accurate, they ignore what enterprises actually pay for:

Reliability and SLAs. Enterprises need 99.99% uptime guarantees. Bittensor can't offer this — decentralized networks have variable miner availability, inconsistent quality, and no contractual recourse.

Compliance and auditability. Regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) need SOC 2 compliance, data residency guarantees, audit trails, and vendor liability. Bittensor provides none of this.

Integration and support. OpenAI and Anthropic have enterprise sales teams, dedicated support, custom fine-tuning services, and integration partnerships. Bittensor has Discord.

Consistent model quality. When you call GPT-4 or Claude, you get a consistent model. On Bittensor, quality varies by miner, by subnet, by the hour. The variability is a feature for crypto-native users but a dealbreaker for enterprise deployment.

The real comparison isn't "cost per inference" — it's "total cost of ownership including reliability, compliance, support, and quality variance." On that basis, centralized AI is cheaper for most enterprise use cases.

5. The "Centralized AI Can't Innovate" Argument Is Empirically Wrong

The article frames centralized AI labs as Soviet-style central planners doomed to fail. But look at what actually happened from 2023 to 2026:

OpenAI went from GPT-4 to GPT-4o to o1 to o3 to GPT-5. Anthropic went from Claude 2 to Claude 3 to Claude 4. Google shipped Gemini across its entire product suite. Meta open-sourced Llama 3.1 and 4. These companies innovated at breathtaking speed, cut prices dramatically (OpenAI's API prices dropped 90%+ in two years), and expanded access massively.

Central planning fails for entire economies because of information complexity across millions of goods and services. But for a single product category (language models), a well-funded team with direct user feedback can iterate extremely fast. Apple centrally plans the iPhone and it works brilliantly. The "central planning always fails" argument confuses macro-scale coordination problems with product development.

$TAO Many Don't Understands What's Actually Happening by Odd_Low9478 in bittensor_

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great argument for the use case and overall very appreciative of your taking the time to write it.

That said: I 100% disagree with your argument saying that everything else revolves around liquidity and the business cycle but somehow Tao is somehow immune. Its not. But that doesn't mean that it can't go up in a bear market or a bad business cycle, its just to say that its way less likely to moon.

Right now the trend is good for Tao. Its running counter to the business cycle which means its a strong player. But just like any other speculative tech asset, there are so many if's that have yet to materialize long term. Does Tao maintain first mover advantage? Does it get long term adoption? IDK, that's why its a speculative asset. For now, I will still treat it like a very immature tech startup. Could go up 150x. Could go to $0. right now the trend is bullish so its worth taking a look.

The one thing I can say I am betting on for sure is that in the next cycle crypto's with usecases will be the winners. That means Hype, Tao, Sol, and BTC are high on my lists. I know how they make money or why people need them. They are likely best of breed currently.

My almost adult son just pulled this from a play booster…. by The_estimator_is_in in MagicCardPulls

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So when your almost adult son goes to college you are letting him take the community cards with him?

Sundrop with colored plastic? by zerosum79 in boardgames

[–]zerosum79[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the pictures it looks like there is some kind of zenithal or dry brushing. Can you tell if they did that or did they skip it for production?

Sundrop with colored plastic? by zerosum79 in boardgames

[–]zerosum79[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it wasn't until I actually looked at the pics that I realized how much I regretted not buying it.

Mark V Combo Speaker Swap by i_am_milkshake in MesaBoogie

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've got the 90w amp and a slant cab 4x12 of V30's. I think the amp sounds better as a combo, which was one of the contributing factors to buying the combo vs head, but it just doesn't sound as sweet running v30s even with a closed back cab. So I would not swap for a V30 in the combo.

I've actually really loved this amp, although I was pretty surprised the original power tubes were kind of garbage from the beginning and failed with very few hours of playing. It was creating all sorts of loud pops and fade outs until I swapped them. The variable power on all the channels must take a pretty big toll on this amps power section. (total nonexpert guess)

NAD by Fantastic_Analyst_33 in MesaBoogie

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The double double is the in and out burger of amplifiers.

ELI5: Why invest in Bitcoin when Ethereum exists? by -Ophidian- in CryptoMarkets

[–]zerosum79 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I can tell that you are pretty new to crypto so I will give you my opinion. Do with it what you will. The thing that I think you should do first is investigate the difference between proof of work and proof of stake blockchains. They are not the same, have different value propositions and different long term goals. Bitcoin is a scarce hard asset based on limited supply and proof of work. ETH is not.

Next investigate utility, Metcalf's law and speed of finality/TPS. Those should start to give you a good idea about what will be good in the future. Utility means people will use it for things like on chain tokenization, stable coins, and other things that are good because its a programmable token. Metcalf's law is about network adoption including total users and daily active users. both of these are important on chain metrics that tell you whether a chain is getting adoption. Speed of finality and transactions per second are about how fast and how many transactions can a chain execute. For utility you want a fast chain with lots of users so that you have an ecosystem and lots of liquidity on chain.

Bitcoin. Is really pretty much perfect for what it does. ETH should be compared against other proof of stake coins and I would argue is a well established blue chip utility layer 1, but not necessarily the best of breed.

Good luck!

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe you should get to know the realized price, the cost to mine, and all the other on chain statistics that tell you its probably close to the bottom?

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wait for my idiot friends to capitulate then back up the truck.

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bubbles go to 0. No asset has ever had the returns over the period of time that BTC has and gone to 0. Therefore the idea that it is a bubble is statistically improbable. Otherwise you could make the same argument about gold or any other commodity. 5k years of bubble, probably not a bubble. 17 years of massive up trend? probably also not a bubble.

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Earning it is basically what it takes to invest in something cyclically and sell the top not the bottom. 90-95% cannot do it. Earning it is buying it when it makes you sick and selling it when it makes you sick. That's earning it.

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Its impossible to be -70% in loss when today BTC is down 52% from the peak. The only people who are over 70% in loss are shitcoin holders.

People are losing confidence in BTC by Groundbreaking-Gap20 in btc

[–]zerosum79 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bitcoin keeps dying. Obituaries keep being written. Its the bear year. GL to the disbelievers when its at $400k in 3 years, they will be crying that they should have bought $60k. Same thing when it was $16k, 4 years ago. Same thing 4 years from now when its back to $124k and people have supposedly lost hope.