Hi all,
I'd like to open a discussion about testnet3 to put out some feelers on potential changes to it. First, a few facts:
1. Testnet3 has been running for 13 years. It's on block 2.5 million something and the block reward is down to ~0.014 TBTC, so mining is not doing a great job at distributing testnet coins any more.
3. Testnet3 is being actively used for scammy airdrops; those of us who tend to be generous with our testnet coins are getting hounded by non-developers chasing cheap gains.
4. As a result, TBTC is being actively bought and sold; one could argue that the fundamental principle of testnet coins having no value has been broken.
This leads me to ponder the following questions, for which I'm soliciting feedback.
1. Should we plan for a reset of testnet? If so, given how long it has been since the last reset and how many production systems will need to be updated, would a reset need to be done with a great deal of notice?
2. Is there interest in fixing the difficulty reset bug? It should be a one liner fix, and I'd argue it could be done sooner rather than later, and orthogonal to the network reset question. Would such a change, which would technically be a hard fork (but also arguably a self resolving fork due to the difficulty dynamics) necessitate a BIP or could we just YOLO it?
3. Is all of the above a waste of time and we should instead deprecate testnet in favor of signet?
- Jameson