With our first anniversary fast approaching on the 13th of July, it’s time to look back on our wild ride in Bittensor, in our role as miners, subnet owners, observers and contributors. We will be sharing our insights in a few articles, the first of which you are reading now, and is about honest mining. Please let us know what you think in our Discord channel!
Miners have only one goal: to maximize their earnings. They will not pursue the stated goal of the subnet. They will look at the validator codebase and find any trick or loophole that increases their chances of winning.
“Honest miners” that pursue the stated subnet goal, are often not competitive, and will lose time and money. Such honest miners will either leave the stage or turn into normal miners, that only maximize their earnings. This is Darwinism at work. Honest miners simply don’t survive.
We’ve seen this across multiple subnets, where winning choices were clearly not choices that aligned with the subnet goal. We’ve seen miners trying their best to do what they thought they had to do, by running the “official miner code,” only to find out it did not work at all.
Subnet owners (and other onlookers, competing miners maybe) then often helpfully said that the top miners significantly improved the official miner code, while in reality the top miners often found a loophole to score off the charts, thereby securing a top spot on the incentive curve or leaderboard.
On a longer timescale, such issues are not problematic, if they are discovered and mitigated quickly, and if they don’t occur too frequently. This is an effective method to do more and faster development cycles than any normal team can do – if the subnet team is on the ball.
The coming days we will share articles that detail various methods used by successful miners, either drawn from our own experience or as we’ve seen other miners do. Studying and understanding miner behavior is crucial for understanding Bittensor dynamics and for a proper subnet design.
A few articles will detail various other miner archetypes. Next up is the rogue miner.
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