Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] The Future of Bitcoin Testnet

From: Garlo Nicon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2024 23:57:23 -0700 (PDT)

> nothing stops people from using, say, regtest for that kind of testing.

How can you test the scenario, where it is hard to get new coins, and you 
have to get them from the current owners, by using regtest? If the 
difficulty is absolutely minimal, and every second nonce gives you a valid 
block hash, then you don't have to worry about your hashrate, because you 
can always produce a new block, and publish your tests, no matter what.

Also, if you have no difficulty adjustments, then you cannot realistically 
see your hashrate, even on your CPU. You have to apply a lot of soft-forks 
on regtest, if you want to check those cases. And you cannot test "getting 
coins from the current owners" either, because regtest is not safe enough 
to be deployed online, and you have to soft-fork it into signet, if you 
want to do so.

Which means, that if you want to test "how the network could behave after 
many halvings", then testnet3 is a better choice than regtest (which you 
cannot safely deploy online) or signet (which have less halvings than even 
mainnet).

And in general, I think it is a good idea, to have at least one test 
network, which will have more halvings than the mainnet, so we can see in 
advance, what could happen, before those problems will hit the main 
network. By the way, when I think about it now, then my conclusion is, that 
it would be nice, to even have a network, where timestamps are pushed 
forward, and for example we could see year 2038 or year 2106 problem in 
some test network earlier, than on the mainnet.

sunday, 31 march 2024 at 23:30:04 UTC+2 Peter Todd wrote:

On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 06:01:51PM -0300, Nagaev Boris wrote: 
> > If we fix the difficulty reset bug, we might as well also fix the coin 
supply 
> > issue: get rid of the halving for testnet and just make every block 
create new 
> > coins. 
> 
> If such a change is made, then such a network won't be suitable to 
> test halvings and software behaviour related to halvings. 

I don't think that's very important. That's a very small part of what 
testnet 
is used for, and nothing stops people from using, say, regtest for that 
kind of 
testing. We already changed important consensus code around difficulty with 
testnet-specific behavior. 

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 

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