Topic: What's up with the need for tBTC? (Read 583 times)

Like you I have never seen this tBTC DApp. And I have no idea about this tBTC. After coming here, I thought this is a coin like Bitcoin. If I'm not wrong, then what I think is true? I want to know your thoughts about this tBTC.

damn I also curios about this one since bitcoin doesn't have popular smart contract like ethereum or binance smart chain. Or maybe they are try scam people, but if this the case is it too obvious.

I usually ask dozen of testnet coin on eth, bsc, polygon or other form of EVM chain to use test DecentralizedApp but I'm never seen dApp in tBTC

I haven't seen it (and don't know how I could check). I don't expect propagation speed to be a problem.

I don't know. If it's the difference between 166 ns and 3.3 ps, that shouldn't matter compared to pinging the rest of the internet.

It now makes me wonder if nullama tested it with CPU. A few seconds would indeed be far too much.

If you promise to behave, I can give you access

That's one possibility. Did you have any 'accepted' (by Bitcoin Core) blocks? That maybe just didn't propagate quickly?

Indeed; around 50,000 times slower than a BM1397 chip. That means you're trying 1 hash every 166.7 nanoseconds, meanwhile the ASIC can do one hash every 3.333ps. I'm honestly not sure that you need anything much faster for a difficulty of 1.
How many tries will it take to find a valid block at this difficulty? 1 or 2 tries, no?

I know from ASICs that the driver tells the chip to go through a whole range of parameters, otherwise the overhead would be too high.
In case the CPU miner is configured similarly, maybe only asking for new work every couple of seconds; that could be a problem.

I may try it myself; just don't really feel like stressing my computer hardware so much.

Since they are free, people often dont bother to keep the seed words of their wallets and loose access to the coins. They simply get new coins if they need them. Since the reward is dropping and there seems to be a higher and higher demand in general it is basically impossible to get a large amount these days.

I guess my CPU miner still loses from the ASICS and GPU miners, even when the difficulty is 1. Or I made a mistake somewhere.

I think it's 6.58Mh/s:

Yes (it's only 35 GB).

I used nullama's guide.

Wow, interesting!
Right now, over last 24h I got another 33 blocks.
What's your hashrate like? And do you have the node fully synced (just in case)?

I did miss the requirement of ~40GB disk space in mocaccino's guide, but it wasn't too bad; IBD went relatively quick.

Your post got me motivated, so I've been mining Testnet on CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz) for the past 19 hours. So far, not a single block mined.

I've used a few Testnet wallets (when playing around with LN) that show Bitcoin's dollar value for Testnet Bitcoins. I can imagine that's confusing, and makes some people believe it has value.

Could be that these people, especially if they are newbies mistake tBTC for BTC and thought you were giving it out as some sort of a raffle or a giveaway. It could easily be the case considering how it takes a while for a regular person to even get a hold of what testnets are.

Or it could also be a case of people scamming people who are none the wiser about how bitcoin works. Ber months are coming and these people could've seen that they could scam other people with tBTC by saying it is BTC. If these people aren't that knowledgeable about the cryptocurrency world they might just fall for it.

All in all my friend, don't hesitate to ask them what they would use it for, maybe even decline the ones who seem fishy to you. You're the one who holds the tBTCs, you're the boss.

It can be anything. May be someone is trying to scam someone which is why they are asking for 100 tBTC.
May be someone don't know they can use fractions of tBTC and hence may be asking for 100 tBTC to test something.
May be someone wants to test more number of wallets or something but even then they wouldn't require such a huge amount of tBTC.

That's actually possible, though! With home CPU most probably, too. I just mined 27 blocks over the last ~24h using a single Compac F; those were always 1-difficulty-blocks, so it should have been possible with CPU, just as well. Testnet difficulty drops to 1 after 20 minutes without new blocks, so developers who need tBTC for their project can literally get a full coin over a day by following nullama's guides.

I also don't get it. I'm interpreting this as people stealing tBTC from victims. Or is it that they "trade" BTC with them for tBTC?


Perhaps you can impose a small tBTC limit so that even in the case that people try to scam with it, they won't be able to pull off a lot of money. Something like the equivalent of $20, if it were real money.

usually you spin the core and/or electrum, depends on your needs. current testnet generation (v3) is around 25GB in size.

I don't know what is tBTC but after few minute to do research, I know it is testnet bitcoin.

I am confusing and don't know which wallet is the lightest and best wallets to use testnet bitcoin. Would you mind helping me to choose the lightest wallet for tBTC? My laptop does not have too much free storage space.

the point of testnet is to test the same exact thing without having any cost. if we start changing the protocol then we end up with something that is no longer bitcoin, in other words it becomes an altcoin instead of bitcoin-testnet. not to mention that the clients have to significantly change their code to implement changes that may seem simple (such as block reward).

if the coins are indeed scarce then the problem is somewhere else (coins burnt or hoarded).

Why does Bitcoin Testnet have block halving in the first place? If it's for testing the protocol, they should be done by now. Considering the scarcity problems it might even be good to change the protocol for increasing inflation: a block doubling instead of halving will ensure testnet coins won't be scarce again.

100% in agreement... If somebody needs testnet coins, it should be as simple as
=> editing bitcoin.conf on your testnet node (which you are running anyways, since you're developing a project for which you need tBTC)
=> running minerd for 1 hour
=> waiting untill your mined tBTC is mature
=> having enough tBTC for your project, donating the rest to a faucet when you're done

However, i've calculated that at this point in time there is > 100 Th running on the testnet (115 Th iirc, i did the calculations a couple days ago). No home cpu miner can ever compete with this... If this continues, a developer would actually need to buy an ASIC or rent hashrate to get enough tBTC to test his/her project, since nobody knows who's hoarding tBTC, and people with faucets (like me) also have a very hard time getting tBTC to give away for free.

A reset is direly needed... However, if it's just a reset without any other protocol changes, the miner (or miners) that's currently using relatively new ASIC's on the testnet will just continue mining with his ASICs on the "new" testnet, and not much will change... Offcourse, if the block reward is once again 50 tBTC, at least a developer can rent hashrate for a short amount of time, since he'd only have to solve one or two blocks to get enough tBTC for about any project he fancies (at the moment, you'd have to solve a whopping 500 blocks to have ~100 tBTC).

To be honest, i don't have a clear-cut answer for this conundrum either.... Just as a brainstorm exercise i was thinking about a reset of the testnet and a huge premine done by the dev's on this newtestnet. The devs can then either run an honest high-claim tBTC faucet themselves, or fund the 6 or 7 existing faucets (maybe even make an agreement with the faucet owners first, about minimum claim amounts, no popups, minimal advertisement,...). An other option would be to look at the altcoin community and borrow some of their idears (like making the testnet POW/POS, or making resets very common so nobody wants to burn electricity to mine tBTC that'll only be valid for a couple of days/weeks).

At this moment, coinbase rewards seems to end up funding addresses like this one:
live.blockcypher.com/btc-testnet/address/2N3oefVeg6stiTb5Kh3ozCSkaqmx91FDbsm/

Once in a while, other addresses pop up tough... But not very often.

What happened to all existing testnet Bitcoins anyway? Who's hoarding them? It's not supposed to be scarce, and it's not supposed to be in high demand. They're supposed to be easy to get for whoever needs them for testing anything Bitcoin related.
At this point I'd say it's about time to reset testnet again, and start over from scratch. So instead of the options above, you could probably accelerate this by selling them! Of course, testnet Bitcoins aren't supposed to have value, and they aren't supposed to be sold, but at this point a reset may be better (for a while).

Some altcoin giving an incentive for Testnet Bitcoins, that's not how testnet is supposed to be used.

Should asking for Testnet Bitcoins even be allowed in Project Development? It's not as if they're sharing a new project or anything, it's basically no different than asking for donations:

Yep , this definitely seems to be it - here’s another post
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/need-testnet-bitcoin-to-find-bugs-in-a-dapp-5260913

it is hard to say since it could take some effort.
i'd say it depends on how many coins they are asking for and who they are. for example if a known developer were to ask for coins or an anonymous person. and there is a difference between a small amount and something like 100. the later is always shady.

and i still say that almost all cases do not need large amounts of tbtc or any amount for that matter. they can perform all their tests on regtest and generate millions of coins in literary a couple of seconds and perform their tests.

if i were you i'd demand explanation from those who ask huge amounts or even a link to the project they are developing .