Gittensor Miner Guide

A complete guide for miners on Bittensor Subnet 74 (SN74). Learn how the scoring works and how to maximize your TAO rewards.

1. What is Gittensor?

Gittensor is a Bittensor subnet that pays you TAO cryptocurrency for contributing to open-source projects on GitHub.

The concept is simple:

• You make pull requests to whitelisted open-source repositories
• Validators automatically detect and score your merged PRs
• You earn TAO proportional to the quality and impact of your code

You don't need to run any mining software. You just need a Bittensor wallet, a GitHub account, and the ability to write code that gets merged.

2. How It Works (Big Picture)

3. Getting Started

Prerequisites

• A Bittensor wallet with a registered hotkey on subnet 74
• A GitHub account (must be older than minimum age requirement)
• A GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo read access

Register Your PAT

# Install the CLI
pip install gittensor

# Broadcast your GitHub PAT to all validators
gitt miner post --wallet <your-wallet-name> --hotkey <your-hotkey-name>

# Verify validators received it
gitt miner check --wallet <your-wallet-name> --hotkey <your-hotkey-name>

After this, start making PRs. The system will automatically detect and score them.

Important Rules

4. The Eligibility Gate

Two Requirements

Credibility Formula

• Only PRs within the 35-day lookback window count.
• Open PRs do NOT affect credibility.

Examples

5. How Your PRs Are Scored

The AST-Based Scoring System

Gittensor doesn't just count lines of code. It uses tree-sitter to parse your code into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and scores individual nodes.

Step 1: Parse both versions. The validator fetches the file content before and after your PR (using merge-base, not branch tip, so only your actual changes are counted).

Step 2: Compute tree diff. It compares the ASTs and finds:

• Added nodes: things in the new code that weren't in the old code
• Deleted nodes: things in the old code that aren't in the new code
• Both count toward your score (refactoring/removing code is valued too)

Step 3: Score each node. Every AST node has a weight:

Structural Nodes (High Value)

These represent the "skeleton" of your code:

Leaf Nodes (Lower Value)

These are the actual tokens in your code:

Non-Code Files

Files with these extensions use simpler line-count scoring (capped at 300 lines):

Documentation-only PRs score very little.

Test Files

Files detected as test files get a 0.05 weight multiplier — test code scores 95% less than production code.

Detection: files in tests/, test/, __tests__/ directories, or files named test_*.py, *.test.js, *.spec.ts, etc. Also Rust #[cfg(test)] and Zig test blocks.

Other Rules

• Deleted files (status removed) score zero.
• Files larger than 1 MB are skipped entirely (score 0).

6. The Full Scoring Formula

For each merged PR:

7. Multipliers Explained

Repo Weight Multiplier

Each whitelisted repo has a weight. This is the single biggest multiplier.

• bitcoin/bitcoin: 100.0 (the highest)
• opentensor/subtensor: 71.03
• entrius/gittensor: 53.48
• Most Bronze repos: 0.12 - 0.20
• Median repo: 0.17

A PR to bitcoin/bitcoin scores ~588x more than a PR to a typical Bronze repo (weight 0.17).

Time Decay Multiplier

PRs lose value over time after being merged:

Formula: sigmoid curve with 10-day midpoint, 12-hour grace period, 5% floor.

Credibility Multiplier

Equal to your credibility ratio (see Section 4). Applied linearly to each merged PR. If your credibility is 0.80, every PR scores 80% of what it would at perfect credibility.

Review Quality Multiplier

Only counts CHANGES_REQUESTED reviews from maintainers (OWNER, MEMBER, COLLABORATOR). Regular contributor reviews don't affect this.

Spam Multiplier

Binary: 1.0 (normal) or 0.0 (all rewards zeroed).

Issue Multiplier

If your PR closes a valid linked issue, you get a bonus multiplier between 1.0 and 2.0:

Rules for issue validity:

• The issue must have a different author than your PR (no self-created issues)
• The issue must have been created before your PR was created
• For merged PRs: the issue must be CLOSED within 1 day of merge
• The PR must not have been edited after it was merged

8. Bonus Systems

Pioneer Dividend

If you are the first miner to contribute a quality PR to any whitelisted repo, you become the pioneer for that repo.

When other miners (followers) later contribute to the same repo, you earn a cut of their scores:

Cap: The total pioneer dividend cannot exceed 1x your own earned_score on that repo. So at most, your score on that repo doubles.

Eligibility: A PR must be merged AND have token_score >= 5. Pioneer is determined by earliest merge date.

9. Penalties to Avoid

Open PR Collateral

Each open PR costs you 20% of its potential score, deducted from your total:

Even if you're under the spam threshold, open PRs actively hurt your score. Close or merge them.

Shared GitHub Account (Sybil Detection)

If the same GitHub user ID appears on multiple miner UIDs, ALL UIDs sharing that account get zeroed out. Not just the duplicates — everyone.

Maintainer PRs Are Filtered Out

If your GitHub account has OWNER, MEMBER, or COLLABORATOR status on a repo, your PRs to that repo are skipped entirely.

Self-Merged PRs

If the person who merged the PR is the same as the author AND there are no approving reviews from other people, the PR is skipped. You need at least one external approval.

10. Which Repos to Target

There are 1,414 whitelisted repositories across three tiers:

Tier Distribution

Top 20 Highest-Weight Repos

11. Which Languages Pay Most

Language weight is multiplied into your token score per file. Higher weight = more points per AST node.

12. PR Filtering Rules

Not every PR counts. The validator applies these filters:

PRs That Are Counted

• Merged to the default branch (usually main or master) or explicitly listed additional acceptable branches
• Merged within the last 35 days
• Author is NOT a maintainer (OWNER/MEMBER/COLLABORATOR) of the repo
• Not self-merged (unless there's an external approval)
• Repository is in the whitelist and not marked inactive

PRs That Are Skipped

Open PRs

• All open PRs to whitelisted repos are counted (no date filter)
• They contribute collateral deductions
• Too many open PRs triggers the spam penalty

Closed PRs

• Closed PRs within the 35-day window count toward credibility
• They don't earn any score themselves
• The mulligan forgives your first closed PR

13. Dynamic Emissions

After all miners are scored and normalized, the entire reward pool is scaled down based on overall network activity:

When the network has fewer miners or less activity, a larger portion of emissions gets recycled (sent to UID 0). As more miners contribute to more repos with higher quality, the scalar approaches 1.0.

14. Issue Bounties

Gittensor has a parallel reward system using smart contracts on Polkadot:

• 15% of total emissions go to an issue bounty treasury (UID 111)
• Repository maintainers can register issues with bounties
• When a miner's PR closes a registered bounty issue, they can earn the bounty
• Validators vote on solutions

gitt issues list              # View registered bounty issues
gitt issues submissions <id>  # View PR submissions for an issue
gitt harvest                  # Harvest pending bounty emissions

This is separate from the main OSS scoring system and is an additional earning opportunity.

15. Strategy Cheatsheet

Phase 1: Get Eligible (First Priority)

Phase 2: Maximize Score

Things to Avoid

The Ideal PR

Gittensor Miner Guide — Generated from source code analysis of Subnet 74 (v5.0.0)