The market has spoken. It has. Babelbit has been judged by TAO holders. But Bittensor ISN'T the market. A translation subnet lives or dies on whether translation customers buy it, and no enterprise customer is checking the dereg queue on Taostats before they sign a contract. I think Bittensor has created a problem where the TAO-holders are the electorate, so teams are forced to market inwards at the expense of customer acquisition. In 2018 Tesla was the most shorted stock in the US and every analyst and his dog predicted bankruptcy. Elon ignored the share price, slept on the factory floor, and made Tesla the most valuable carmaker in the world two years later. In '97 Apple was nearly insolvent, and Michael Dell's advice was to shut it down and return capital to shareholders. Then came the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone. I fear Bittensor would have lost both to dereg.

Where's the revenue? I know how important revenue is in a business, but we need to be realistic. It often takes good companies years to generate revenue, and the AI mega corps like OpenAI and Anthropic still wouldn't be able to fund buybacks today. I think OpenAI is still lossmaking, Anthropic might have just had its first profitable quarter. Both are fortunate to be backed by patient capital, and their backers cannot delete the company when the share price has a bad quarter. And in most cases buybacks won't come from revenue, they'll come from SURPLUS cash, which is rarer still. Yes, Bittensor buybacks aren't capital-return: alpha price is effectively the payroll, propping it is a pay-rise that attracts better miners. True. But that means you need to fund your payroll from revenue in year one or lose your best people. Even OpenAI can't do that. I don't know who can. And yes, emissions are Bittensor's version of patient capital. But VC money never has to pass a daily market test in the same way that emissions do. Price falls, emissions fall, payroll thins, output degrades, the price falls further. It's a death spiral by design. So many companies we hold up as examples of doing it right spent years as ugly ducklings, unpopular and burning other people's money. The difference is that nobody had the power to delete Amazon for a couple of slow quarters. And while we all want subnet owners to go into the world and find revenue, look at what else we give them to think about that their VC-backed competitor doesn't: alpha price, emissions, rule changes, chain upgrades, staying active on X, posting in Telegram groups, answering questions in Discord. Running a subnet is like trying to keep a Tamagotchi alive.