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Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2024 16:02:29 +0000
From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
To: Jameson Lopp <jameson.lopp@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] The Future of Bitcoin Testnet
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On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 09:19:50AM -0400, Jameson Lopp wrote:
> 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?

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.

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

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