Subject: [bitcoindev] The Future of Bitcoin Testnet

From: Jameson Lopp <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2024 09:19:50 -0400

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.

2. The reason the block height is insanely high is due to a rather amusing
edge case bug that causes the difficulty to regularly get reset to 1, which
causes a bit of havoc. If you want a deep dive into the quirk:
https://blog.lopp.net/the-block-storms-of-bitcoins-testnet/

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

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email-masked].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/CADL_X_eXjbRFROuJU0b336vPVy5Q2RJvhcx64NSNPH-3fDCUfw%40mail.gmail.com.