Bitcoin Forum

So those of you who have been around for a long time know that I was promoting for awhile the idea of trying to both monetize the Bitcoin Testnet (Lots of people disagreed with me, thats fine) and to use it as a learning tool to experiment with Bitcoin exploits, with a greater range of OP codes, etc...

At the time, SHA-256 alt-coins were kind of tricky as ASICS were just starting and any GPU mined chain pretty quickly got blasted out of the water. These days however ASIC being old news and lots of people having unproductive ASICS, perhaps now is a better time to reinvestigate the idea of the Bitcoin Testnet.

It's built into your Bitcoin client, People are actively mining on it (not me for many months now save a few spotty attempts) and a number of very cool interesting projects are running on it.

Of course there are a gazillion Alt-coins out there now, why not return to the first, true alt-coin? The testnet inside bitcoin with exotic transaction types and no-security worries. (IE: no downloading someone elses crazy alt-coin binary)“ and full security/code support by the Bitcoin dev team? 

i'm only joining this if i get reasonable piece of the pie, getting them to an exchange is easy, the question is, just how many are out there?

lol like a current exchange would last 10 minutes after listing  ;)

well, it's not like testnet is totally destitute. quite a few people are on it, and have been for awhile. I've haven't been active since I kinda of stopped talking about it. I had a p2pool, and tried to go back to it, but it wasn't working and I dropped it. If you have spare hashpower, you could mine on testnet, or any other alt-coin. It's your pick really. But what is reasonable to you? I assume you are in bitcoin, yet suppose you have only a mere fraction of the coins that are out there. It's not like it's going to hurt you.

I do not understand, why would you suggest us mining the BTC Testnet?

i'm adverse to downloading the client again, if we can have 3 pools including 1 pps then we can begin developing a real community. i do not have much hardware where i am so it'll just be during my spare hours.

anything with the prefix "alt" needs an exchange these days since these are all just speculative commodities that have a habit of having falling value all the time.

said like someone purely in cryptos for the fiat.

Bills to pay, i do some as a hobby, but one must indulge in moderation. there is no way you can justify running 5+ 4mh machines without viable returns.

I'm still interested, and I have more testnet Bitcoins than any other altcoin. :)

Don't they reset the testnet and kill all the coins on a semi-regular basis?

They can do so at any time.  They have done so twice.  There's nothing stopping people from continuing to transact on testnet3 (the current testnet) even if they reset it, although the advantage of testnet being "built into the Bitcoin client" goes away at that point.

Because he has loads of testnet coins and wants them to gain value or at least get put on an exchange so he can dump them.

Are you not essentially saying:

"come join our work team we are digging holes then filling them back in , you probably won't get paid, but we provide the digging tool! FREE! "

" it will be hard work and it will cost you ! "

" remember no pay ! "


"nothing."

As opposed to "insertaltcoinofthehourhere"coin? Yep.

True, and it's a pretty convincing argument as well. I would propose something like a testnet3 project where the code is on git hub, and you can compared side by side with the bitcoin code to see that (if they change the testnet genesis block) you could download (or compile) a testnet3 Bitcoin client, which was the same as the current bitcoin client, with only a different genesis block.

That said, there has been work to create a client where it's easy to switch genesis blocks, which would allow you to jump on various testnet chains at will. So rather then resetting the genesis block, people who want to do only dev work with bitcoin could choose whatever genesis block they wanted, while others could monetize a testnet chain if they wanted.

Thats not true. The testnet works the same as the main-net which they also don't have absolute power over. What i am advocating is taking the testnet3 chain, which starts at the testnet3 genesis block and using it like a full alt-coin. The devs are free to release a new client with a DIFFERENT testnet genesis block which would create a new testnet. But the testnet3 chain still exists. The dev's can't change that just because they don't like it.

Oh yeah! There are a number of features laid out by satoshi (advanced scripting) that are in the bitcoin software but DISABLED on the mainline bitcoin because people aren't sure yet what effect they will have. These features are all available on the test net. Search for a mike Hearn video from the London conference to get an idea about some of the insanely cool stuff that could be done as examples. Smart property, special contracts, etc... Lots of cool stuff.

sounds like bytecoin may be for you. stop trying to monetize something that's not supposed to be monetized.

lol - stop trying to dictate the laws of economics. :)

(Love me some Bytecoin, but testnet3 is still a good idea.)

like paper? or 1s and 0s?

you love bytecoin so much you can buy all of them for less than 10,000 usd! such a bargain :D

hah.. the truth

don't think you've been listening in class today  8)

It's really be said so many times, even in this thread just one page lower.

They don't "reset" the chain, they change the genesis block, which creates a NEW chain. The old one still exists, nothing changes about that. They just make a new one in an updated version of the client. Actually there is work right now to make it so that you can optionally switch between chains within the config of the client. Very handy for people who want to try different things on different chains that multiple people are mining, without needing to start from scratch.

So no. Your coin does not go "poof".