Messari.io
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12:30 May 16, 2025
Bitcoin mining has morphed into a capital‑intensive, highly concentrated business: two pools—Foundry USA and AntPool—now command more than half of global hashrate, and a handful of public mega‑miners dominate the rest. Subnet 14, TAOHash, offers a counterweight by turning raw hash into a live‑traded “alpha” token; miners swap their BTC payouts for SN14, while validators buy that same token with earned BTC to keep rigs pointed at them, creating a perpetual buy‑back loop. In just weeks this mechanism bootstrapped ~6 EH/s (≈0.7 % of the network) with zero capex, effectively making SN14 a perpetual futures market for hashrate. Planned upgrades—running its own solo‑pool, routing multi‑coin hash, and selling block‑space priority fees—aim to undercut traditional FPPS fees and funnel extra revenue into further alpha demand. TAOHash thus illustrates how Bittensor’s incentive rails can redirect compute away from entrenched centers, pricing it in real‑time tokens and potentially restoring decentralization to Bitcoin’s s...