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Mining in Bittensor

Choosing a subnet

All mining in Bittensor occurs within a subnet. Each subnet independently produces the digital commodities that are its purpose, each subnet creator defining a different incentive mechanism for validators to use in judging miners' work. It is validators scores of miners' performance, according to this incentive mechanism, that determines the proportion of the subnet's emissions allocated to each miner. See Emissions.

Mining in Bittensor is not like mining Bitcoin or many other blockchains, it is active, creative, and competitive. Preparing to be a subnet miner involves researching the right subnet(s) for you to mine, given your own expertise and access to hardware.

Browse the subnets and explore links to their code repositories on TAO.app' subnets listings.

Typical compute requirements

Each subnet may have distinct hardware requirements, but this minimum requirements template for subnet creators may give an idea of minimum memory, bandwidth and storage requirements for a typical subnet node.

Mining is not supported on Windows.

Miner registration

To participate as a miner, you must first register a hotkey with the subnet in order to receive a UID on that subnet.

No need to create a subnet to mine

You do not have to create a subnet to mine on the Bittensor network. Most miners work on established subnets.

Registration has a cost in TAO, which fluctuates dynamically based on time since last registration. When you secure a UID slot in a subnet on the main chain, this TAO is sunk cost.

A subnet can have a maximum of 64 subnet validator UIDs and 192 subnet miner UIDs (256 total) in subnets other than Subnet 1.

Upon registration, your hotkey, which is part of your wallet, becomes the holder of the UID slot.

Ownership belongs to a hotkey

When you delegate your TAO to a subnet validator, you attach your delegated TAO to that validator’s hotkey. See Delegation.

A hotkey can hold multiple UIDs across separate subnets. However, within one subnet, each UID must have a unique hotkey.

Run the following command on your terminal, replacing <your_preferred_netuid>, <my_coldkey>, <my_hotkey>. <your_preferred_netuid> is the netuid of your preferred subnet.

btcli subnet register --netuid <your_preferred_netuid>  --wallet.name  <my_coldkey> --wallet.hotkey <my_hotkey>

For example, for subnet 1 (netuid of 1):

btcli subnet register --netuid 1 --wallet.name test-coldkey --wallet.hotkey test-hotkey

Miner deregistration

Miners as well as validators can be deregistered if their emissions are low.

Typical subnets have 256 UID slots, with a maximum of 64 slots capable of serving as validators. This leaves 192 UIDs for miners, though if there are fewer validators, a miner can occupy one of the additional slots.

Each tempo, the 'neuron' (miner or validator node) with the lowest 'pruning score' (based solely on emissions), and that is no longer within its immunity period, risks being replaced by a newly registered neuron, who takes over that UID.

Deregistration is based on emissions

The subnet does not distinguish between miners and validators for deregistration purposes. The chain only looks at emissions (represented as 'pruning score'). Whoever has the lowest emissions will get deregistered.

Immunity period

• Every subnet has an immunity_period hyperparameter expressed in a number of blocks.

  See

  See immunity_period.

• A subnet neuron (miner or validator) at a UID (in that subnet) has immunity_period blocks to improve its performance. When immunity_period expires, that miner or validator can be deregistered if it has the lowest performance in the subnet and a new registration arrives.

• The immunity_period starts when a miner or validator is registered into the subnet.

Special cases

In case of a tie, the older node gets deregistered first.

In the unlikely event that all neurons are still immune, the one with the lowest 'pruning score' will be deregistered by the next incoming registration.

The subnet owner hotkey has permanent immunity from deregistration.

Registration flow diagram

Below is a diagram illustrating a subnet neuron's registration timeline:

• Blocks are processed in subtensor (the Bittensor blockchain) every 12 seconds.
• A subnet miner registers a hotkey and receives a UID—and its immunity_period starts.
• The miner publishes its Axon’s IP:PORT for the subnet validators.
• The subnet validators refresh their metagraph and discover the new Axon.
• The subnet validators send requests to that Axon and evaluate its responses. This drives the subnet’s incentive mechanism, awarding emissions to the miner.
• While still in the immunity_period, the subnet miner builds up its emissions from zero.
• If the miner’s emissions rank among the lowest for nodes outside of their immunity_period, their UID gets transferred to the next new registrant.

Subnet miner emission

Emissions may not always appear as a smooth curve. Emission might only update at the end of tempo periods, or subnet validators might do more frequent internal updates. For example, a validator might detect new miners and refresh every 100 blocks.

Moving a subnet miner to a different machine

Once your subnet miner has begun mining, you can move it to a different machine, but proceed with caution.

To move a subnet miner from one machine to another, follow these steps in order:

1. Start the subnet miner on the new machine.
2. Wait for the old miner to stop receiving requests from the subnet validators.
3. Stop the old miner.

It can take subnet validators some time to recognize the updated IP of the Axon for your subnet miner.

Inspecting UIDs

After you obtain a UID slot, you can view your wallet’s status by running:

btcli wallet overview --netuid

After providing your wallet name when prompted, you will see output such as:

Parameter	Value	Description
COLDKEY	my_coldkey	The name of the coldkey associated with your slot.
HOTKEY	my_first_hotkey	The name of the hotkey associated with your slot.
UID	5	The index of the uid out of available uids.
ACTIVE	True	The validator has set weights within the subnet's activity_cutoff
STAKE(τ)	71.296	The amount of stake in this wallet.
RANK	0.0629	This miner's absolute ranking according to validators on the network.
TRUST	0.2629	This miner's trust as a proportion of validators on the network.
CONSENSUS	0.89	This validator's aggregate consensus score.
INCENTIVE	0.029	This miner's incentive, TAO emission, is attained via mining.
DIVIDENDS	0.001	This validator's dividends, TAO emission, are attained via validating.
EMISSION	29_340_153	This miner's total emission in RAO (10^(-9) TAO) per block.
VTRUST	0.96936	This validator's trust score as a validator.
VPERMIT	*	For validators: The uid is considered active for validating on this subnet.
UPDATED	43	Blocks since this miner set weights on the chain.
AXON	131.186.56.85:8091	The entrypoint advertised by this miner on the bittensor blockchain.
HOTKEY_SS58	5F4tQyWr...	The ss58-encoded address of the miner's hotkey.

Checking miner registration status

Use any of the Python snippets below:

• Using Python interpreter: Type "python" or "python3" in your terminal, then paste a snippet.
• Using a Python file: Copy into, e.g., check_reg.py, then run python3 check_reg.py.

With SS58 hotkey

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
print(f"Registration status for hotkey {hotkey} is: {sub.is_hotkey_registered(hotkey)}")

With SS58 hotkey and netuid

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
netuid = 1 # subnet uid
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
mg = sub.metagraph(netuid)
if hotkey not in mg.hotkeys:
  print(f"Hotkey {hotkey} deregistered")
else:
  print(f"Hotkey {hotkey} is registered")

With UID and SS58 hotkey

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
netuid = 1 # subnet uid
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
mg = sub.metagraph(netuid)
uid = 2 # Your UID
registered = mg.hotkeys[uid] == hotkey
if not registered:
  print(f"Miner at uid {uid} not registered")
else:
  print(f"Miner at uid {uid} registered")