Preparing your miner

Once your miner is registered in the network and you have Subtensor running locally, you are ready to begin Serving or Validating.

This area of the documentation will guide you through how to Serve and Validate on the network, and how to make basic customizations with flags in order to set your miner up for success in the network. Pair these flags with calls to btcli or any other mining start command.

You may also configure your miner through a config file or environment variables. See Methods of Configuration and Configuration Settings for more.

Running a miner

To run a basic miner with no specific conficurations:

btcli run

Adding flags

You may add flags to your btcli run mining script to customize how you would like your miner to behave.

Choosing your hardware

To run with GPU or CPU:

--neuron.device <cuda | cpu>

Choosing a chain

This argument specifies which instance of Subtensor you will connect to: a local copy, the public Finney copy, or the test chain Nobunaga.

--subtensor.network <local | nobunaga | finney>

You can also select a network endpoint:

--subtensor.chain_endpoint <>

Choosing a subnetwork

This argument specifies which subnetwork you would like to mine on.

--netuid <>

Specifying a wallet

Every running miner must be connected to a registered hotkey. This code will specify which coldkey (wallet) you wanted to use, as well as the corresponding hotkey.

--wallet.name <>

--wallet.hotkey <>

Specifying a port

Specifying a port to which to access the network is important because you will benefit from entering a low traffic area. This will generally be one above 1024 and below 65535. Each miner needs to have a unique port, so if you have two Servers running on the same machine, they will require two separate ports.

The miner communicates with the network through its communication endpoint, the axon. This is where the argument is made.

--axon.port <>

ex.

--axon.port 8090

Restarting you miner

Only use this argument when if wish to restart your training from the beginning. This will reset all training progress.

--neuron.restart

Different ways to start a miner

This is for advanced or power users of Bittensor

Sometimes you may want to create your own validator or your own server, in which case btcli will not work as it is pointed at specific files within the Bittensor repository. The following commands demonstrate how to run your own custom script along with the same Bittensor flags. Note that the path of the script that the command examples are using are the same ones that btcli uses currently.

python3 -u ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/<core_server | core_validator>/main.py --no_prompt --subtensor.network local --wallet.name <> --wallet.hotkey <>

Process managers like PM2 and TMUX are another option, however since they are not a part of Bittensor, they will not be a part of this documentation.