Learn·Bittensor
What a miner is, and what a mechanism is
A miner is a registered neuron that validators actually pay; a mechanism is one scoring loop — and a few subnets run more than one.
Published 2026-09-17
A miner is a UID with incentive
Every participant on a subnet is a neuron: a hotkey registered into one of the subnet's UID slots, for a burn in τ set on the chain for that subnet. What it is depends on its permit — a neuron with a validator permit scores the others and is paid in dividends; one without is scored, and is paid in incentive.
Incentive is the share of the subnet's miner emission the validators' weights assigned to that UID at the last epoch. A miner's income is decided by the scoring loop, not by anything it holds. The subnet page lists the top UIDs by reward with role, stake, incentive, dividend, emission and axon, and its Hyperparameters panel shows UIDs, Reg. burn and whether registration is open.
Registered is not paid
A UID can be registered and earn nothing: its incentive that epoch is zero. So the screener's Miners column does not count UIDs. It counts neurons with a non-zero incentive score, across every mechanism, with the owner's own neurons taken out.
The owner's neurons come out because their incentive is not paid: the chain destroys it and scales the subnet's whole τ allocation by (1 − burn). That share is the Miner burn % column — Σ over mechanisms of (mechanism weight × owner neurons' incentive ÷ all incentive). Both are read from the chain's incentive vectors every 30 minutes, and say what the last epoch paid, not how many machines are online.
A mechanism is one scoring loop
A subnet can run more than one incentive mechanism. Each has its own incentive vector — its own set of paid miners — and its own slice of the emission (MechanismEmissionSplit). The UID space is shared, so one UID can be paid under one mechanism and not another.
The chain stores the count (MechanismCountCurrent); a subnet with no entry runs exactly one, which is almost all of them. Reading only the first mechanism of a subnet that runs two would report zero miners and a total burn where the truth is the opposite, so Taosis reads every mechanism, sums the miners and weights the burn. The Mechs column appears only once some subnet runs more than one — a column of ones is not information.
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What a subnet is
A subnet is an independent market for one kind of work, with its own token, its own miners and its own price.
Tempo and emission
Emission is the chain paying for work on a fixed schedule — the metronome behind every subnet number.
How emission is split
New τ is allocated per subnet every block, paired with α where the pool allows and spent buying α where it does not — with root stakers and miner burn taking their share.