My reason for mining on the public testnet, and if I am wrong with my thinking I appreciate being corrected.
1.) I am building an application that accepts bitcoins.
2.) My testers are in the US and in Europe
3.) If they start their bitcoin clients with the -testnet switch and make transactions their TX will have to be included into the blockchain somehow
4.) If no one mines on the testnet, then #3 won't work
That's pretty much the motivation... Does that sound right ??
1.) I am building an application that accepts bitcoins.
2.) My testers are in the US and in Europe
3.) If they start their bitcoin clients with the -testnet switch and make transactions their TX will have to be included into the blockchain somehow
4.) If no one mines on the testnet, then #3 won't work
That's pretty much the motivation... Does that sound right ??
That's right, but to me it seems block creation on the testnet can be erratic...which is why I'm interested in running a private testnet and mining on that (difficulty is very low and block creation can be better controlled).
But, I've run into an issue with a private testnet...a public testnet managed to find and connect to my private test net and nuked my private chain. I guess I'll need to setup one central client that accepts inbound connections and lock it down with iptables or something...an option like -allowip (similar to -rpcallowip) would be very convenient...I could explicitly allow just the clients on the private testnet to connect to this central server (and make sure they only have one connection using -connect and -nolisten).
