This is part of our series on a year of Bittensor experience, leading up to our anniversary at the 13th of July. We discuss 9 miner archetypes before digging deeper into incentive landscapes. After discussing the honest, the rogue and the calculative miner, we’re looking at the blockchain-savvy miner today. Please let us know what you think in our Discord channel!
There are subnets where blockchain skill becomes more important than AI skill, or where blockchain skill is the only factor deciding who wins and who loses.
Sometimes subnet owners seem willfully ignorant and choose to look the other way when everyone feels that something is off. But at one time it became so obvious that it could not be ignored, when in a subnet solutions were posted to challenges, before the challenges were known, violating basic principles of causality. The skill needed to win there, apart from deriving the few possible winning answers, was to bulk-post submissions in the right block as the first submitter.
At some point, in a particular subnet, having the lowest UID gave the extra edge needed to win a tie-break. With some blockchain skill, it is possible to increase chances of registering a hotkey, and by timing this to the moment the lowest UIDs are up for deregistration, one can consistently get low UIDs. This then allows the miner to win all tie-breaks, which is required once the actual mining challenge is cracked and all top miners submit their answer in the first block.
In a different subnet, somebody decided to spend a significant amount of their earnings on buying all UIDs, with a registration script that was better than all others. This gained the top miner a monopoly on all mining slots. Needless to say, this miner doesn’t even have to do the actual mining work anymore; as long as it keeps all UIDs it can just submit garbage instead of performing quality AI work.
A properly designed subnet should provide a level playing field for miners skilled in AI, regardless of their blockchain skill.
Next up is the optimizing miner.
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