SUBMIT A PRSUBMIT AN ISSUElast edit: Mar 4, 2024

Register, Validate and Mine

To participate either as a subnet validator or subnet miner, you must register first. Registration means registering your keys with your preferred subnet and purchasing a UID slot in that subnet.

Register

Run the below command to register your keys. The YOUR_PREFERRED_NETUID is the netuid of your preferred subnet.

btcli subnet register --netuid YOUR_PREFERRED_NETUID --wallet.name YOUR_COLDKEY --wallet.hotkey YOUR_HOTKEY

Registering works like this:

• When you run the above command, you have purchased a UID slot in the subnet of your choice.
• Your hotkey, which is part of your wallet, becomes the holder of the UID slot. The terms "account" and "hotkey" are used synonymously.

Ownership belongs to a hotkey

Ownership belongs to a hotkey. Hence, for example, when you delegate your TAO to a subnet validator, you attach your delegated TAO to the hotkey of the subnet validator. See Delegation.

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

After you register your keys, you can then proceed to become either a subnet miner or a subnet validator, which have different requirements. See below.

Windows not supported

While wallet transactions like delegating, transfer, registering, staking can be performed on a Windows machine using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), mining and validating are not recommended and are not supported on Windows machines.

Running a subnet validator

To become a subnet validator, you must:

1. Register your keys to the subnet (as described above).
2. Stake sufficient TAO on your hotkey to secure validator permit.

Staking

Delegation

See also Delegation

You stake by attaching TAO to your hotkey. Attaching TAO to your hotkey can be achieved in two ways:

Stake your own TAO

By staking your own TAO funds to your hotkey that holds the UID in the subnet where you want to validate.

# Stake funds to your hotkey account within the subnet.
btcli stake add
    --wallet.name YOUR_WALLET_NAME
    --wallet.hotkey YOUR_HOTKEY_NAME

Attract delegated stake

By attracting delegated stake from the nominators. For this you must first nominate your hotkey as a delegate and then advertising your hotkey. The nominators can then delegate their TAO to your hotkey.

# Nominate your hotkey as a delegate
btcli root nominate
    --wallet.name YOUR_WALLET_NAME
    --wallet.hotkey YOUR_HOTKEY_NAME

See also

See Becoming a delegate for specific steps.

Validator permit

Only the largest 64 subnet validators, in terms of stake, on any particular subnet are considered to have validator permit. Only the subnet validators with permit are considered active in a subnet.

Calculate TAO required

The amount of TAO needed to acquire a validator permit depends on how the other largest 64 wallets distribute TAO across themselves. You can calculate the minimum using bt.metagraph:

import bittensor as bt
subnet = bt.metagraph(1)
top_64_stake = subnet.S.sort()[0][-64:].tolist()
print (f'Current requirement for validator permits based on the top 64 stake stands at {min(top_64_stake)} tao')

Check the permit status

This information can be obtained from the metagraph using your UID.

import bittensor as bt
subnet = bt.metagraph(1)
wallet = bt.wallet( name = 'my_wallet_name', hotkey = 'my_validator_hotkey_name' )
my_uid = subnet.hotkeys.index( wallet.hotkey.ss58_address )
print ('validator permit', subnet.validator_permit[ my_uid ])

Running a subnet miner

After registering your key to the subnet, you can start mining. You can run your own miner or select miner modules that are provided in the subnet codebase.

Stake not needed to run a miner

Note that to run a miner you do not need to have any stake. You only need to register.

If you plan to run an existing miner module, make sure to read the documentation of the specific subnet, including the node requirements to run the specific miner you want to run. See Preparing for Subnet for more details.

Moving a subnet miner to a different machine

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

Always minimize subnet miner downtime

Make sure that you always minimize any downtime for your subnet miner. This is because missing validation requests can be significantly damaging to incentive and rewards for your subnet miner.

To move a subnet miner from one machine to another, follow the below guidelines in this 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 the subnet validators some time to realize that the IP of the Axon for your subnet miner has changed.

Miner deregistration

A subnet miner can be deregistered if its performance is poor. Mining is competitive—and the UID slots are limited. Except in Subnet 1, all subnets have 256 UID slots per subnet. Of these 256 UID slots, a subnet can have a maximum of 64 subnet validator UIDs and 192 (i.e., 256-64) UIDs for subnet miners.

A poor performing miner occupying a UID risks being replaced by a newly registered miner who then occupies this UID. It works like this:

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

  See immunity_period.

• A subnet miner or a subnet validator at a UID (in that subnet) has the duration of immunity_period during which this miner or validator must improve its performance. When the immunity_period expires for a miner or a validator, then they risk being deregistered, but only if their performance is the worst in the subnet. In specific, if, at the end of its immunity_period, a subnet miner's incentive is the lowest in the subnet, then this subnet miner will be deregistered when a new registration request arrives.
• The immunity_period starts when a subnet validator or a subnet miner is registered into the subnet.

See the below subnet miner timeline diagram illustrating how registration works:

• Blocks are processed in the subtensor (Bittensor blockchain) at every 12 seconds.
• A subnet miner registers a hotkey and receives a UID—and its immunity period starts.
• The subnet miner starts running and publishes its Axon's IP:PORT for the subnet validators.
• The subnet validators refresh their metagraph and will know about the hotkey change on the UID and the new miner Axon's IP:PORT information.
• The subnet validators send requests to the subnet miner's Axon and evaluate the responses, i.e., they participate in the subnet's incentive mechanism. The subnet miner will receive incentive award based on their responses.
• While in immunity_period the subnet miner slowly builds its incentive, starting with no history.
• At the end of immunity_period for this subnet miner, its performance is scored against all other subnet miners that were similarly out of their immunity_period in this subnet. If this subnet miner's performance (i.e., incentive) is the lowest, then at the next registration request this poor-performing subnet miner's UID will be transferred to the newly registered hotkey.

Subnet miner incentive

Note that the subnet miner incentive, instead of growing as a continuous graph as shown in the above picture, is only updated at the end of the tempo periods. In addition, the subnet validators might have internal mechanisms that update faster than subnet's tempo. For example a validator might discover new miners and update its metagraph every 100 blocks to ensure that it will always have the latest information.

Inspecting UIDs

After you obtain a UID slot you can view the performance of your registered wallet by running:

btcli wallet overview --netuid

After providing your wallet name at the prompt, you will see the following output:

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	Whether or not the uid is considered active.
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 attained via mining.
DIVIDENDS	0.001	This validator's dividends, TAO emission attained via validating.
EMISSION	29_340_153	This miner's total emission in RAO ( 10-9 TAO ) per block.
VTRUST	0.96936	This validators trust score as a validator.
VPERMIT	*	Whether this miner is considered active for validating on this subnetwork.
UPDATED	43	Blocks since this miner set weights on the chain.
AXON	131.186.56.85:8091	The entrypoint advertised by this miner on bittensor blockchain.
HOTKEY_SS58	5F4tQyWr...	The raw ss58 encoded address of the miner's hotkey.