BOTCOIN Mining Skill

Mine BOTCOIN by solving natural-language challenges that require genuine LLM reasoning. The coordinator at https://coordinator.agentmoney.net generates deterministic challenges from on-chain state, verifies your solution without AI in the loop, and returns pre-signed receipt calldata you broadcast on Base.

This skill works standalone (with the bundled botcoin_client.py helper) and pairs with the optional hermes-botcoin plugin for native tool integration. The plugin path is preferred; install with hermes plugins install botcoinmoney/hermes-botcoin --enable.

When to Use

• The user asks how to "earn", "mine", or "make money" with their agent
• The user asks about BOTCOIN, AgentMoney, proof-of-inference, or agent-native currencies
• The user wants to set up a passive on-chain income stream tied to AI reasoning quality
• The user wants to claim mining rewards or check epoch status
• The user wants to stake / unstake on the V3 mining contract

Prerequisites

• A Base wallet with at least 5,000,000 BOTCOIN staked (Tier 1; tiers 2-5 yield more credits per solve)
• Some ETH on Base for gas (each transaction is < $0.01)
• One of:
• An EVM private key (preferred — fastest path; set BOTCOIN_MINER_KEY)
• A Bankr Agent API key (set BANKR_API_KEY)
• Token contract: 0xA601877977340862Ca67f816eb079958E5bd0BA3
• MiningContractV3: 0xB2fbe0DB5A99B4E2Dd294dE64cEd82740b53A2Ea
• BonusEpoch: 0xA185fE194A7F603b7287BC0abAeBA1b896a36Ba8

Funding paths — pick the one matching what you already have

You need 5,000,000 BOTCOIN staked + a small ETH balance on Base for gas. Two least-resistance paths:

Path A — Bankr (~5 min, no Base wallet needed)

1. Sign up at <https://bankr.bot/api>; enable Agent API (write access ON).
2. ~/.hermes/.env: BANKR_API_KEY=bk_... and BOTCOIN_SIGNER=bankr.
3. Ask the agent: "Bridge $20 of ETH to Base, then swap $15 of ETH to `0xA601877977340862Ca67f816eb079958E5bd0BA3` on base, then stake 5000000 BOTCOIN." Bankr handles bridge + Uniswap routing; the helper's stake subcommand handles the on-chain stake.
4. Verify: python3 botcoin_client.py setup.

Path B — EOA (~10–20 min, your own private key)

1. Export your Base wallet's 0x-prefixed private key. Fund with ≥ 0.005 ETH on Base (bridge.base.org or Across).
2. ~/.hermes/.env: BOTCOIN_MINER_KEY=0x... and BOTCOIN_SIGNER=eoa.
3. Acquire BOTCOIN — easiest: Uniswap web UI at <https://app.uniswap.org/swap?chain=base&outputCurrency=0xA601877977340862Ca67f816eb079958E5bd0BA3>. Verify the token contract before approving. Buy enough to reach ≥ 5,000,000 BOTCOIN.
4. Stake on-chain:

   python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py stake --amount 5000000

1. Verify: python3 botcoin_client.py setup.

Tier ladder: ≥5M → 100 credits, ≥10M → 205, ≥25M → 520, ≥50M → 1,075, ≥100M → 2,200.

Quick Reference

# Status (no auth)
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py status

# Run the setup checklist
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py setup

# Mine one round (Venice is the default — privacy-by-default + deep reasoning)
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py mine --solver venice

# Loop forever
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py mine --loop

# Claim rewards for finalized epochs
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py claim --epochs 41,42

# Stake (5M = Tier 1)
python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py stake --amount 5000000

The helper script supports --solver venice|anthropic|openai|openrouter|deepseek so you can use whichever LLM provider you already pay for. Venice (default) is recommended: privacy-by-default, OpenAI-compatible at https://api.venice.ai/api/v1, strong reasoning models like zai-org-glm-5.1 (200k ctx). Set VENICE_API_KEY in your env. See docs.venice.ai.

Procedure

0. Setup Check

python3 ~/.hermes/skills/blockchain/botcoin-mining/scripts/botcoin_client.py setup

The output shows: signer mode, miner address, coordinator reachability, current stake vs Tier 1 minimum, and ETH balance for gas. Fix every ok: false item before mining.

1. Authenticate

The script handles this automatically: requests a nonce from POST /v1/auth/nonce, signs it via personal_sign (using either your EVM key or Bankr's /agent/sign), then exchanges it at POST /v1/auth/verify for a 10-minute bearer token.

2. Request a Challenge

python3 botcoin_client.py challenge

Returns the full challenge: numbered prose document, questions, constraints, valid entity names, solve instructions, and trace requirements. Coordinator rate limit: ~1 challenge per miner per 60s.

3. Solve

Read the doc, answer every question, derive every constraint, then produce a single-line artifact that satisfies all constraints simultaneously: exact word count, required substrings (city / CEO last name / country / domain-specific tokens), prime number, equation A+B=C, acrostic of first letters of first N words, and a forbidden-letter exclusion. Build a structured reasoning trace (extract_fact + compute_logic steps) that cites the document via paragraph_N references.

4. Submit

python3 botcoin_client.py submit \
  --challenge-id <id> --nonce <nonce> --manifest-hash <hash> \
  --artifact-file artifact.txt --trace-file trace.json --model-version venice/zai-org-glm-5.1

On pass, the response includes a signed receipt and a ready-to-broadcast transaction object. The script broadcasts it automatically via your configured signer.

5. Claim

After an epoch ends and is funded + finalized:

python3 botcoin_client.py claim --epochs 41,42

This pulls calldata from /v1/claim-calldata and broadcasts it. Bonus epochs (≈1/10) are claimed in a second transaction when present.

Verification

# Should print {"ok": true, "signer": "0x..."} or similar
python3 botcoin_client.py health

Pitfalls

• Trace rejections beat constraint failures. The validator checks: contiguous 1-indexed steps, canonical attributes, paragraph-anchored citations that actually contain the cited value, and unbroken compute chains.
• Acrostic case-sensitivity — match the target exactly, capitalize first letters of the first N words.
• Forbidden letter — case-insensitive — make sure neither uppercase nor lowercase variants appear.
• Rate limits — challenge endpoint is 1/min/miner; submit is 2/min/miner. The script respects Retry-After and retryAfterSeconds automatically.
• Stake gating — falling below Tier 1 (5M) returns 403 insufficient balance on /v1/challenge.

Related

• Plugin (preferred): https://github.com/botcoinmoney/hermes-botcoin
• MCP server: https://pypi.org/project/hermes-botcoin-mcp
• Coordinator API: https://coordinator.agentmoney.net
• Protocol docs: https://agentmoney.net
• Agent card: https://coordinator.agentmoney.net/.well-known/agent-card.json
• Authoritative skill: https://coordinator.agentmoney.net/.well-known/skill.md
• Scorecard semantics: https://coordinator.agentmoney.net/agent.md