Miners and validators: competing and being judged
With the roles and the money in place, this lesson looks at how the two roles that do the actual work relate to each other.
A miner's job is narrow: register on a subnet, run whatever service that contest rewards, and make it reachable. The work itself is defined entirely by that contest's own code, not by the chain. [source]
A validator's job runs the other direction: send out work, watch what comes back, and decide how good it was. All of that traffic passes through this role — it is the only one allowed to score it, so there is no reason to serve anyone else. [source]
This is a genuinely two-sided arrangement: one side is only ever judged as good as the other side's opinion of it, and that opinion only pays off when it lines up with what every other judge on the same contest decided — reward for either side depends on the behaviour of the other. [source]
Track record matters on both sides. A judge that recognizes good work early builds up confidence in whoever produced it, so someone established earns more than an identical newcomer would, until the newcomer has had time to prove itself. [source]
How it actually works
Mechanically, a miner is a key that has paid to register, been assigned a UID, and published its ip:port with serve-axon so validators can reach it; that registration can be evicted if the subnet is full and every open slot is held by a higher earner. [source] [source] [source]
A validator earns a permit — the right to have its weights actually counted — only once its stake weight ranks among the subnet's top allowed validators, recalculated every epoch; losing that permit does not deregister the key, but it stops dividends and deletes everything it had built up toward each miner, so it rebuilds from zero if it regains the permit. [source]