Really interesting convo below from this weeks all in on why a16z stays away from the neoclouds, and it made something click for me about Bittensor. @bhorowitz point is that scaling compute on debt is a dangerous arbitrage business, and he lived it in 99 when bandwidth was $1,500/megabit and the only way to get it was a 3 year contract. By 2001 it was $50 - If you were holding that on borrowed money you were dead. His case for $CRWV being different is that AI compute is in a massive shortage, so GPU and data center prices keep rising. Maybe he's right. But the neocloud model is still a levered bet that GPU scarcity outlasts the debt, because they borrow against the GPUs and the lenders get paid on a schedule whether or not the market cooperates. A compute subnet on Bittensor is basically a decentralized neocloud that doesn't need any of that. There's no GPU purchase to finance (miners show up with their own hardware) and no 3 year capacity contract to get stuck holding if prices move. The token + the network do the job the debt does for CoreWeave. Emissions bootstrap the supply side, and as demand and revenue grow the subnet puts that value back into its token, which raises what miners earn and pulls more compute onto the network. The token is the lever that scales how much compute you can harvest and coordinate. So if GPU pricing ever pulls a Loudcloud, the subnet doesn't blow up, its incentives just buy more compute than they used to. With no debt there's nothing to default on, and nobody can call a loan or force a fire sale. The risk you take on instead is token volatility, which you manage with a treasury (keep cash on hand and use it to support your token through drawdowns). A bad market can starve a subnet for a while, but one with real demand underneath it can ride that out. The tradeoff is a slower, more gradual build. A neocloud can borrow its way to a giant cluster fast, while a subnet's capacity grows with the size of the network and the token. What you get in exchange is a far more durable business, mostly because of where the supply comes from. You're tapping a bunch of long tails of compute that a neocloud can't really get at: >people who own their own hardware and want to monetize it when they're not using it >slack capacity in data centers (nobody runs at 100%), which can get sold into the subnet's spot market instead of sitting idle >sunk cost hardware, i.e. paid off GPUs that can't get a contract for anything else >operators in places with cheap power that no lender would ever underwrite a data center for Once a card is paid off the main ongoing cost is power, which even on an H100 is something like 5-10 cents an hour depending on where you are. So a lot of this supply is pretty price insensitive. They make more when the token is higher, but a 50% drawdown in miner rewards eats into their margin and plenty of them keep mining anyway. That gives you a structural supply floor that doesn't really care what the token (and therefore the miner reward) is doing day to day. Then as network value and the token go up, you progressively unlock compute that's more price sensitive (financed GPUs that still have to pay themselves off, US data centers with pricier power, etc). Each one joins once mining becomes economic for it, and you get a flywheel: token up → more of the world's compute profitable to plug in → more capacity to sell → more revenue → more value back into the token → repeat. Every GPU that joins also makes the network cheaper and more reliable to buy from, so you get a real network effect on top of removing the debt risk. And in the limit it can reach more compute than any single hyperscaler could ever build or finance, because the supply side is permissionless and global. You start by tapping into the world's edge compute, and over time the rest of the world's compute comes online as it makes economic sense for whoever owns it.