Who the players are

This lesson introduces four roles, one at a time, before any of them start interacting.

Someone has to design the contest. A subnet owner is the account that registers a subnet and defines its incentive mechanism: what counts as good work, and how it gets measured. [source]

Someone has to do the work being measured. A miner is whoever registers to compete and produces whatever the contest's mechanism rewards — a prediction, a piece of storage, an answer to a question, or anything else the owner decided to pay for. [source]

Someone has to check that work and grade it. A validator is a participant with enough stake behind it to be trusted with judging; it earns a share of the network's payout for grading in a way that lines up with everyone else's grading, and that payout is shared with whoever backed it financially. [source]

Someone has to fund the judging without necessarily doing it themselves. Committing TAO behind a validator instead of running one yourself is exactly what stake is: it adds to that participant's influence in judging, and it earns you a cut of what they earn. There is also a shared pool, the root network, where money is committed to the network as a whole instead of to one specific contest; it still counts toward judging power everywhere, and still earns a share of every contest's payout. [source]