Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Unbreaking testnet4

From: Melvin Carvalho <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:58:37 +0100

út 18. 3. 2025 v 22:24 odesílatel 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development
Mailing List <[email-masked]> napsal:

> Hi,
>
> Testnet4 was rolled out a year ago to address the shortcomings of
> testnet3. One of those shortcomings was the difficulty reset creating
> havoc. [0] In spite of this a similar rule was adopted for testnet4. [1] As
> a result, testnet4 is similarly creating havoc. [2]
>
> The goal of testnet is to mimic the Bitcoin mainnet. This is why it is
> useful to have in addition to a more control testing environment such as
> Signet.
>
> The given rationale for a difficulty reset was to let developers
> occasionally mine blocks on their laptop. But you cannot have your cake and
> eat it too: either the network is permissionless (PoW) or you assign
> identities and privileges to some (Signet). By trying to do both at the
> same time testnet4 created a loophole for abuse. As a result it failed on
> both count: it neither mimics mainnet nor allows developers to mine active
> blocks on their laptop.
>
> I propose to fix this by removing the difficulty reset rule from testnet4
> through a flag day hard fork on 2026-01-01. I picked a date well in the
> future to minimize disruption. This leaves enough time for a patch to be
> reviewed, merged, included in the next major Bitcoin Core release,
> backported to previous releases and adopted by the infrastructure running
> on testnet4. That should be enough for a test network.
>

I just built a Taproot web wallet for Testnet4, designed for anyone who
wants to experiment with it. You can log in using either a hex private key
or Nostr. The wallet lets you send coins to an address or a Nostr npub,
receive coins from a faucet, and send an OP_RETURN.

https://testcoin.org/

There may still be some bugs, but hopefully, this gets more people playing
with Testnet4. If you have feature requests, feel free to mail me.

>
> Let me know what you think,
> Antoine
>
> [0]
> https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/[email-masked]
> [1]
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0094.mediawiki#rule-specification
> [2] https://fork.observer - pick the network on the top right corner
>
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