Finally grasped what’s going on with bittensor and came up with my mental model for it (summarized below) that’s easy to understand Bittensor = AI’s Free Market Economy TL;DR Factories (subnets) compete, miners produce, validators inspect, & TAO + alpha tokens reward the best. The Core Ecosystem Components: Bittensor - the infrastructure of a free market economy where factories compete to produce the most useful goods and the market rewards them based on the value they create Subnet - a factory that specializes in producing a type of useful product Subnet owner - a factory owner that defines what useful thing its factory should produce Miners - the production line managers who perform the actual tasks Validators - the quality control team that inspect the outputs of production workers against factory-defined performance standards Nominators - stakeholders who can back members of the QC team, vouching for their competence and integrity TAO - the global currency of the ecosystem, used to reward factories and their participants Alpha tokens - The local factory currency issued to incentivize and reward its stakeholders. Also, when permitted by a factory’s owner, can even grant governance participation over factory-specific parameters. Lmk what you think @mcjkula @JosephJacks_ @markjeffrey Special thanks to @adamsternbach for jamming with me and helping me form this take