From: emsit <emsit@emsit•sk>
To: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [bitcoindev] Re: The Future of Bitcoin Testnet
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2024 12:22:31 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <e9c98c9c-6a61-4cc6-9efb-9ea2ca9a76f0n@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CADL_X_eXjbRFROuJU0b336vPVy5Q2RJvhcx64NSNPH-3fDCUfw@mail.gmail.com>
[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3552 bytes --]
I had to get involved because when I saw the pull request to reset
testnet3, I was horrified.
Resetting testnet3 without considering the impact after 13 years of use
seems like a very bad and drastic step. As you wrote, testnet3 has been
here for 13 years, it's not possible to kill it overnight.
It will require a transitional phase and announcement so that developers
have enough time to react. So the BTC client will have the option of both
testnet3 and testnet4.
Yes, mining is demanding, it's a pity it went so far... People won't want
to give up their testnet3 coins, including me!!!
How will new users earn testnet4? Will they launch a full node and buy an
ASIC miner? Faucets will stop working for a while, and most faucets will
cease to exist. As long as obtaining testnet coins is not easy and in
sufficient quantity, there will always be a small market. Or will it simply
deviate from the mainnet, and the reward be more generous? (I lean towards
this idea, to keep the block reward from decreasing and having an unlimited
amount, when there is a lot of it, it will not be rare and will not have
value. Or will it reset every year or two so it doesn't have enough time to
become valuable?)
Dátum: nedeľa 31. marca 2024, čas: 15:24:34 UTC+2, odosielateľ: Jameson Lopp
> 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 bitcoindev+unsubscribe@googlegroups•com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/e9c98c9c-6a61-4cc6-9efb-9ea2ca9a76f0n%40googlegroups.com.
[-- Attachment #1.2: Type: text/html, Size: 4478 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-04-01 20:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 40+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-03-31 13:19 [bitcoindev] " Jameson Lopp
2024-03-31 14:33 ` Luke Dashjr
2024-03-31 14:57 ` Jameson Lopp
2024-03-31 17:21 ` Eric Voskuil
2024-04-09 18:28 ` Garlo Nicon
2024-03-31 16:02 ` Peter Todd
2024-03-31 21:01 ` Nagaev Boris
2024-03-31 21:29 ` Peter Todd
2024-04-01 12:54 ` Jameson Lopp
2024-04-01 13:37 ` Pieter Wuille
2024-04-01 14:20 ` Andrew Poelstra
2024-04-01 22:01 ` 'Fabian' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2024-04-02 11:53 ` Jameson Lopp
2024-04-02 18:36 ` Lukáš Kráľ
2024-04-02 19:46 ` Jameson Lopp
2024-04-03 4:19 ` Anthony Towns
2024-04-03 18:18 ` emsit
2024-04-03 19:35 ` Andrew Poelstra
2024-04-30 18:46 ` Matthew Bagazinski
2024-05-01 15:30 ` Garlo Nicon
2024-05-04 17:13 ` Peter Todd
2024-04-10 6:57 ` Garlo Nicon
2024-04-22 4:33 ` Ali Sherief
2024-04-01 13:25 ` Andrew Poelstra
2024-04-01 13:32 ` 'Fabian' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2024-04-01 14:28 ` Warren Togami
2024-04-01 19:22 ` emsit [this message]
2024-04-04 8:14 ` [bitcoindev] " Calvin Kim
2024-04-04 12:47 ` Jameson Lopp
2024-04-05 4:30 ` Calvin Kim
2024-04-06 23:04 ` David A. Harding
2024-04-09 16:48 ` Peter Todd
2024-04-16 17:30 ` [bitcoindev] " 'Sjors Provoost' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2024-04-07 7:20 ` [bitcoindev] " Christian Decker
2024-04-07 8:09 ` K Calvin
2024-04-08 19:11 ` Garlo Nicon
2024-04-09 4:29 ` coinableS
2024-04-28 13:45 ` [bitcoindev] " Matt Corallo
2024-05-02 7:10 ` Ali Sherief
2024-05-04 17:08 ` Peter Todd
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=e9c98c9c-6a61-4cc6-9efb-9ea2ca9a76f0n@googlegroups.com \
--to=emsit@emsit$(echo .)sk \
--cc=bitcoindev@googlegroups.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox