LESSON 1

Traditional Proof of Work (PoW) in blockchains makes miners burn energy on meaningless puzzles, purely to secure the network. Qubic flips this script with Useful Proof of Work (uPoW) – a consensus mechanism where the computational work actually trains AI models instead of hashing useless data .

In Qubic, your mining rigs perform machine learning tasks that contribute to a global neural network (nicknamed Aigarth) rather than wasteful cryptographic calculations . This means every joule of energy spent mining Qubic also pushes an AI project forward, aligning network security with real-world useful work.

Qubic’s uPoW mainly leverages CPU power for AI training tasks . Miners (often called “AI miners”) run intensive operations like matrix multiplications and tensor updates to train artificial neural networks . The network validates that these tasks are done correctly via special validator nodes called Computors . Computors ensure miners are honestly contributing to AI objectives and not cheating.

Importantly, decentralization is preserved: instead of a single data center training an AI, Qubic distributes the workload across a global swarm of independent miners . This democratizes AI development – anyone with a decent CPU/GPU can help build the AI, and no single entity controls it.

How rewards work: Qubic runs on 7-day cycles called epochs. Throughout an epoch, every miner accumulates a performance score based on useful work completed (solving AI training tasks) . At the end of the epoch, the top-performing miners can be promoted to Computor status (there are 676 Computor slots) for the next round.

Computors are the validators who produce blocks (called “ticks”) and earn the largest share of rewards. Even if you don’t become a Computor, you still earn QUBIC coins proportional to the compute power you contributed over the week . In short, miners do the heavy lifting and Computors validate, with payouts every Wednesday based on how much AI work and “RAM work” you did.

A unique innovation in Qubic is RAM mining (RandomX AI Mining) – essentially a clever “idle work” system . If at any point there are no new AI training tasks to compute (for example, if a training round finishes early), your miner seamlessly switches to mining Monero (XMR) using the CPU-friendly RandomX algorithm.

The Monero coins mined during these idle periods are automatically converted to QUBIC and burned (destroyed). This process reduces QUBIC’s circulating supply and helps stabilize the economy while keeping your hardware busy for extra reward credit . In practical terms, you as a Qubic miner are always doing useful work – training Aigarth when tasks are available, and when they’re not, securing another network (Monero) to indirectly benefit Qubic’s value. It’s a win-win that redefines what “mining” can accomplish.