I don't think essentially replacing most of Testnet with a specialised 
test chain is a good idea, but this might be a good time to consider a 
4th test network with very large blocks from genesis onwards.

I do tend to think 2 years of 8mb blocks is excessive as a test, too, 
and while certainly large projects should have or can raise funds for 
test infrastructure, I would worry about the smaller stuff out there. Is 
there anything specific 2 years gives us over, say, 6 months?

Ross

On 22/06/2015 20:23, Peter Todd wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 02:18:19PM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote:
>> I promised to write a BIP after I'd implemented
>> increase-the-maximum-block-size code, so here it is. It also lives at:
>> https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki
> It's important that we see a wide range of realistic testing of what an
> 8MB limit could look in the near future. An important part of that
> testing is load testing.
>
> As of writing the BIP above has no mention of what switchover rules will
> be used for testnet; code floating around has August 1st 2015 as that
> date. I propose we use August 1st 2013.
>
> This switch over date should be set in the _past_ to allow for the
> creation (via reorg) of a realistic full-load blockchain on testnet to
> fully test the real-world behavior of the entire infrastructure
> ecosystem, including questions like the scalability of block explorers,
> SPV wallets, feasibility of initial syncronization, scalability of the
> UTXO set, etc. While this is of course inconvenient - 2 years of 8MB
> blocks is 840GB worth of data - the Bitcoin ecosystem can-not afford to
> make a change like this blindly.
>
> I'm sure with a $3.5 billion market cap at stake we can scrape together
> the resources to voluntarily run a few hundred full-load full-nodes for
> testing a change with the potential to destroy that market cap.
>
>
>
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