This is part of our series on a year of Bittensor experience, leading up to our first anniversary at the 13th of July. We discuss 9 miner archetypes (and some related types) before digging deeper into incentive landscapes. After describing honest, rogue, calculative, blockchain-savvy, overfitting, devops, (over)analyzing, clueless and slow miners, it’s time for a very important archetype: the lazy miner. Please let us know what you think in our Discord channel!
The lazy miner is not a slow miner. Instead of doing real work, the lazy miner may optimize the re-submission of (potentially) successful work, done by others. One example is the same-block copier, who is a blockchain-savvy miner that tracks the mempool, where all blockchain transactions are collected before processing, and re-submits someone else’s commitment in the same block. In the same block means at the same time, in blockchains, so this gives the lazy miner a chance at winning, depending on the specific tie-breaker logic.
An even blockchain-savvier miner will have its re-submission even appear before the original submission in the authored block, thereby confusing the poor subnet developer who thinks that the order of extrinsics in a block either reflects submission order, or is fully random. (Contrary to popular belief, neither view is correct. The true workings are very complicated.)
Other lazy miners find their earnings in subnets where separate challenges incidentally have the same winning answer. There was a subnet where a set of ten answers would cover 80% of challenges. Lazy miners just registered ten hotkeys and posted those ten answers every round for a few pretty successful streaks of winnings. The cost of such approaches is virtually zero; no GPU is needed, the scripts are often tried and tested on earlier subnets, so only the registration fee (times ten) remains.
Of course, many of the previously described miner types are in a sense also lazy miners, as they prefer to take a shortcut over doing the hard work they should officially be doing.
Relay mining, where requests are simply forwarded to an honest miner, to make that miner do the actual work, is a form of lazy mining. While it is almost eliminated by request signing, validators are still in the position to perform relay mining, as they have a legitimate reason to query miners – so miners can’t block their requests without it hurting their earnings. Through analysis of logfiles, these rogue relay-miner-validators can be (and have been) caught. This again emphasizes the value of structured logging and data collection.
Two more types before can dive into incentive landscapes!
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