Topic: testnet bitcoins? (Read 593 times)

I do think that many wallets don't support signet, while supporting testnet3. However, you can easily test your hardware wallet multisig setup with the 0.01tBTC that faucets give you for free. No need to own 7-10tBTC.

Multisig with distinct HW vendors is something I'm thinking of. Does signet allow testing of this kind of research?
How about for mobile+LN wallets?

I wonder if some people are trying to test developers' patience, and force them to start testnet4. But if they do, then maybe this time it should be automatically resetted, for example every two weeks, to kill those speculations about the price of tBTC in BTC once and for all.

Exactly. And if you need to use custom amounts and make it visible on-chain, then you can always use "OP_RETURN ", " OP_DROP" or even make it a thing that is committed to your signature.

You don't even need actual coins to test this, in fact you should not even be testing it like this!
The correct way is first write a well decoupled code and then isolate the part where it sets the amounts, fee, etc. and then give it a mock transaction(s) to test if it sets those variables correctly.

If you are sending zero value transactions, you are not testing that your code is setting the correct amount of coin, so I would not recommend implementing a test that sends zero value txs.

A better solution might be to allow tBTC to be further divisible than BTC.

And there is more: using zero satoshis on test networks is standard. And that makes testing cheaper, because then it is possible to use more coins to pay all needed fees. So, having some huge amount of test coins is mainly about anti-spam capabilities, it just determines, how many messages you can publicly send to test things, and that's all, no more value is behind that. Also, I like this feature of destroying test coins after some time, that should disincentivize people to buy them, and if there is no buyer, then sellers will not make any profits out of it.

The problem with many threads similar to the OP is that some people are willing to lend tBTC secured with valuable collateral. This effectively assigns value to tBTC.

There is also no reason why anyone needs any specific amount of tBTC. They can receive any amount that a faucet is willing to give out, and they can adjust their code by the appropriate orders of magnitude accordingly.

This. And miners should also receive a proportional amount of test coins, related to the mainnet difficulty, or the whole difficulty of all chains, if testnet will track that. So, if the mainnet block reward is 7 BTC, and you mined a block that is 100 times easier, then you should receive 0.07 test coins, not 50 test coins (ideally, you should also receive 0.07 real coins in decentralized way at the same time, but that is another story). And if you mined it with difficulty equal to one, you could receive zero satoshis on the test chain, because rounding down integers during division is the default in many languages, and because you can test all scripts on zero amounts, it would also work.

Another nice to have feature would be to get test coins by signing the mainnet coins. Then, you could sign for example some coins from transaction 9173744691ac25f3cd94f35d4fc0e0a2b9d1ab17b4fe562acc07660552f95518, and get some test coins by doing that (here: zero coins, but there are many dust amounts flying around that you can safely sign). Then, it could work as a test sidechain: you sign some coins, and then you can do your testing, and you can test your peg with the mainchain. Then, you move coins on the mainchain, and then test coins are destroyed, so they can be skipped by other nodes during the initial sidechain download.

Nice idea! I think we could have a timespan of one difficulty adjustment. For example, that could mean, when the difficulty is adjusted on the main network, then all test coins are cleared. Or we could use a moving window of 2016 blocks or something like that, then the test network will follow all mainchain events like halvings and difficulty adjustments, so all amounts of test coins will be quite similar to those used in practice on the mainnet.

In my opinion a better TestNet environment is one with constant automatic reset with fixed difficulty. That way you won't have to download and process 2.2 million blocks (current testnet3 height) or ~28 GB also nobody would be able to hoard coins for long if the chain resets after certain height like 1k blocks. Anybody would be able to mine a block, gets its high reward and use it.

We would just have to prevent certain attacks like one person mining 1k blocks in 1 second using high hashrate. Which could be prevented to some extent by adding extra limitations to minimum time between blocks.

It is because testnet3 has a flaw: if there is no block mined for 20 minutes, then the difficulty drops into one. But if that drop will happen during difficulty adjustment, this minimal difficulty will be used to calculate the adjustment. You can observe any graph of testnet3 difficulty, or just check block headers, you will see that many times difficulty dropped into the minimum, and stayed there, so ASICs could mine a lot of blocks, and that's why it's called "blockstorm".

Well, developers created signet as a replacement for testnet3, to create more stable testing environment. And you can always use signet with signet challenge set to OP_TRUE, then you will get a better version of testnet3.

Of course, but no rational people will buy that, because there is no reason, if there are better options available. Historically, you have testnet3, and that "three" means that developers abandoned testnet two times in the past, so they can abandon it again.

It is impossible to track all purchases globally. But it is possible to observe some global trends. In the past, old test networks were abandoned, because it was publicly known that people use those coins to trade.

In general, my opinion is that testnet3 can be abandoned just by making a better test network. Signet is a good start, but all blocks have to be signed. So, for that reason, I think the next test network should be based on Merged Mining, so you should push the test chain forward by mining the mainchain blocks, then you could make the whole network stronger, while producing some coins for testing at the same time, for the same work. Then, there would be no need to sign any blocks.

Is this when some mining farm decides to mine tBTC and solves blocks within few seconds? I had once seen this done in my mempool and I thought there was something wrong, but the Proof-of-Work was perfectly valid. It was fun to have nearly-zero-seconds block time intervals in bitcoin.  

But with what alibi can they propose testnet3 abandonment? There's nothing stopping me from selling you testnet coins in a P2P and private fashion. And what exactly is considered as charge? Is a testnet faucet supposed to not contain ads, because no one should make money out of tBTC?

wtf are you doing here exactly?!
This is not marketplace and bitcoin testnet coins are free, they have no value, and you can't sell them like that, unless you want to trick someone.
I can offer you money with more zeroes than all previous members did, let's say $000000.

I can send you all of my monopoly money!

Exactly 0!

Exactly. Test networks are useful only for one thing: public testing (mainly for non-trivial scripts, but there are many things to test). If you want to test things privately, you can use regtest for that. For public testing, there is testnet3, that (if it will not be turned off) can be used to test, what will happen after many halvings, when the basic block reward will be zero, or when it will be quite small. The main downside is blockstorming, but that was solved in signet, unfortunately it affected mining. So, in the future I think it could be possible to use Merged Mining on Bitcoin, and receive a proportional amount of test coins, then if anything better will replace testnet3 or signet, those test coins will be abandoned.

So, if you want to sell testnet3 coins, then the only safe price is zero. If you will charge anything more, then you risk that developers could decide to abandon testnet3, and focus on signet, or even to create a separate test network, if signet will be also abused, so those coins will be abandoned, and quickly will be as worthless, as many abandoned altcoins are now.

Also, when it comes to getting coins to test scripts, it is always possible to use zero satoshis, so by owning some nonzero amounts, you only increase your potential of getting your transactions accepted and mined by other miners, it is mainly just a spam protection, because there is no monetary value behind it.

Approximately 0.

in your opinion what is the correct offer in euros for 10 tBTC?
I'll see what it offers me

Confirmed and sent back.

sent 0.01 tBTC
please check
https://www.blockchain.com/btc-testnet/address/tb1qpch9jt8avpd9dvgxewj46ee7glc7u8k4m9n5hr

Here's my testnet address: tb1qpch9jt8avpd9dvgxewj46ee7glc7u8k4m9n5hr.
You could sign a message to avoid sending coins to strangers and bloating the chain with unnecessary transactions, though.