saw a few qns on ABT mining floating ard, so this is my quick attempt to simplify/summarise my understanding of miners' roles from the whitepaper. the tokens themselves are pre-mined, so we're not talking abt conventional mining here.

Contributors (a.k.a. “miners”) actually help to run ArcBlock platform services and join the overall service network, via two main roles.

(i) Resource Miners contribute computing resources, i.e. provide cloud computing capacity and run as a cloud node, or contribute self-hosted computing resources.

(i) Component Miners contribute software components (i.e., functional codes) to the system, such as new Chain Adapters, Blocklet Components, or ready-to-deploy dapps. The component might be packaged code that can be reused and deployed by another application on Arcblock, or a set of services that’s itself hosted through Arcblock. One example is a deep learning-based image recognition service (which may already be running elsewhere), but which elects to offer the services as Blocklets so that other ArcBlock applications can use them.

the principles behind these are simple, contribute some stuff and u get some reward back in return. not sure whether we shd call it "mining" though. seems quite distinct from the conventional term, except maybe for (i).