What Bitcoin Teaches Us About Building Decentralized AI Infrastructure

A few years ago, a quiet agreement took place in Silicon Valley. The biggest AI labs — OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, xAI, Anthropic — began consolidating computing power. Government agencies cheered them on, while regulators drafted executive orders defining how many trillions of GPU operations could be used for training large models.

What started as a race for artificial intelligence turned into a geopolitical battle for compute.

Every new regulation looks like “safety,” but in practice, it means control — who gets to train models, who gets to build data centers, who’s allowed to innovate. The rest of the world watches, locked out by price and policy.

The Hidden Supercomputer No One Mentions

But there’s another network out there — one that was never planned by any government or corporation. It’s called Bitcoin.

If you add up the total power of all Bitcoin miners, you get roughly 26 gigawatts of distributed energy — more than all the data centers of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI combined. And this network isn’t owned by anyone. It’s self-governed, self-financed, and constantly expanding. In the past year alone, it added about 5 gigawatts without a single construction permit, PR announcement, or government subsidy.

Bitcoin isn’t just “digital gold.” It’s a prototype of a global, decentralized supercomputer built by millions of participants acting out of aligned incentives, not corporate contracts.

The Lesson from Bitcoin

Bitcoin proved that distributed systems can outperform centralized ones when incentives are aligned. Its miners, scattered across continents, somehow built something more resilient than the world’s most advanced tech empires. If we can apply that same principle to AI, if we can design open standards, shared protocols, and economic mechanisms that reward contribution, we could decentralize intelligence itself.

And just as Bitcoin turned computation into an open market, we can turn collaboration, liquidity, and innovation into borderless networks owned by the people who build and use them.

And that might be the most powerful idea of our time.