Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone

I need around 2.5 BTC in testnet coins. Can someone on this forum please spare some coins, I will return them once I have finished with my dev work.

On the same topic, it seems that most faucets are slowly shutting down, do you think a market will develop for testnet coins?

my address: tb1qpmfjyph7gsmwhzw4y4z6qsscm3dhwzd4m5zuz3

Thanks in advance

I guess there will be a forum user who can lent that much of testnet coins here, you just have to wait though or else try some testnet faucet site you can find a lot of it online.

Or you can try this one suggested by BitCryptex.

Most of the faucets only giveaway very small amounts of coin, which most likely covers most use cases.

I am aware of running my own local testnet and I have already done that. however I am doing some work on lightning network and i need to connect to open many channels to various nodes on the network.

Sent PM maybe able to help

I think this one used to give away up to 0.5 BTC
https://coinfaucet.eu/en/btc-testnet/

Additionally, a search led me to this user, he might be able to help you further if nobody else responds.
The only problem: He hasn't been online here since January. But you can check his profile and contact him through his site that is listed there > https://anycoindirect.eu/en

this happened once before some years ago but since it is "testnet" the network was simply abandoned and new one was started effectively invalidating all the coins that were being traded!

I will search tomorrow, i think i have around 0.3 bitcoin testnet, i'm not 100% sure but i will check and i will send to you, maybe you can find also some parts on faucets.

What you want to test?

Getting such high number of Bitcoins, even in testnet is becoming a chore these days. You could try the testnet box : https://github.com/freewil/bitcoin-testnet-box
If not, try sticking with low values and get your testnet coins from faucets. I am pretty sure no matter what you do, if anything that works with 0.00025 BTC would also be applicable to 2.5 BTC

PM this user (studio_mining (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1925846)), he has enough coins, and I think he'll give you that amount easily.
Why do you need 5BTC? I think what is done by 0.005 BTC  is done by 5 btc.
Do you need to do a lot of small transactions?

I had the same question. Realistically a 0.1 btc can be transacted at least a hundred times even with todays fees and all. But with the OP silent and gone all we can do is speculate about his intentions. Under such circumstances I think letting this thread die would be the best option.

Hit me up if you still need those testnet coins... I should be able to loan you a couple for testing ;)

Thanks everyone, i have got the coins.

something tells me its online casino trials) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5198172.msg52963146#msg52963146

carefull with this guy big scammer  >:(

Looking for 15-30 Testnet Bitcoin for a new application... Can anybody help us out? Happy to return some of the coins after a month and/or make a small donation.

Thanks!

There are people around here who lend out testnet coins for a small collateral.

But what do you need that many coins for?
You should be able to do all of your testing with less than 0.1 tBTC? Why do you need such a large amount?

Testing an app with third party investors. It's a bit silly to only let them buy 0.1 (test) BTC in a test system

Got them, thanks everyone!

Where do test coins come from, is there any kind of mining?

The OP makes an incorrect term. Testnet Bitcoin is abbreviated as tBTC, not BTC.

Testnet Bitcoin, theoritically has zero value, financially but people have to mine it. To mine, electricity, mining rigs are need (and of course human resources) so that there are actually input money. Consequently, tBTC has output value somewhat.

Just remember if someone try to contact you (go first with PMs) and want to sell testnet Bitcoin tBTC with value too high (of course lower than value of real Bitcoin BTC), they are scammers.

To get tBTC, you can visit some faucet pages or contact mocacinno (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=405464) -- who has the last faucet in the list.

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• Bitcoin Testnet. Activate, experience it, but don't trade and get scammed. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5215716.0)
• What's up with the need for tBTC? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5260994.0)

are they paying actual money to buy these testnet coins? if yes then it is a scam.
if no (which i'm guessing is the case here) then how come the money they pay (or whatever they use to buy) doesn't exist and is fake but the coins they receive has to be real?

besides there could be an easier way of doing this that takes a little more effort. which would be creating a new regtest per customer that wants to test the system, making the connection between the client and server and sync (it is syncing the couple of tiny blocks mined instantly) then sending them regtest coins in any amount they wish.
no matter how much testnet coins you receive, it could be gone in a single test (a user buying all) or a handful of them if you put a limit which would defeat the purpose IMO.

Yes, they are essentially mined in the same way as Bitcoin on Mainnet... however there are mechanisms in place to make it (theoretically) "easier" to mine by resetting the difficulty from time to time... unfortunately, for whatever reason, some people like to use ASIC mining rigs on testnet which means they mine lots of blocks really quickly and then the difficulty increases dramatically again :-\

Hi, I'm looking to get a larger amount for integration testing purposes; it seems to be taking a while to accumulate a good amount at 0.01 BTC at a time, can anyone help with this?

I just need them for integration and then will return these testnet BTC coins.

Thank you!

You can check and get testnet BTC from one for those faucets. I am not sure they are all active runnning so you need to check.

Testnet Faucet:

• https://tpfaucet.appspot.com/
• https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet: Find out more in the Faucet section.
• https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co
• https://coinfaucet.eu/btc-testnet
• https://tbtc.bitaps.com
• http://kuttler.eu/bitcoin/btc/faucet/
• http://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/
• https://tbtc.mocacinno.com/

Try using regtest to generate as much TESTNET BTC as you need.
It only takes a few seconds to be done because it's a preset low difficulty.

More information / detailed instructions here: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-examples#regtest-mode
or here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5268794.0

This should let you do any testing you need.

-Dave

Yes, there is also a mining process for Testnet coins.
Here is an article about How to Solo Mine on Bitcoin’s Testnet:
https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-solo-mine-on-bitcoin-s-testnet/ (https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-solo-mine-on-bitcoin-s-testnet/)

Did anybody ever determine what was up with the trend of people asking for large amounts of testnet coins? People are asking again... I'm wondering if it is to participate in an airdrop, token sales or some kind of giveaway... Maybe they are scammers looking to pull a tBTC/BTC switcharoo. Anyway I could sworn I saw a thread with an explanation somewhere but I can't find it.

I see some people try to buy it (and you know if there are buyers, there are sellers) tBTC. tBTC is zero-value on the market, in theory. In reality, such testnet bitcoin is not from the air and people have to spend mining cost to mine it.

The total lost tBTC is likely much higher than the total amount of lost BTC. People are less backup their private keys for tBTC and lost it.

You can check the testnet statistics there https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/testnet. The total hashrate of testnet is at 8,259,552.00, not low.

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Sum up:

• Mining cost (expensive, not cheap)
• Huge lost tBTC from its total supply
• The naively thought for the future that sometime in next few decades, people will use tBTC and trade it when price of BTC is extremely high

it was mostly the airdrop thing; some bastard started a trend that DeFi scams needed testnet bitcoin, people were claiming tbtc to get the shittoken. that created a lot of demand for a while and that ended but the trend is not.

there is also always a rare type of scam where they try to sell tbtc to newbies, but this is rarely successful since tbtc requires a different wallet, explorer,... and there is a ton of warning and indicators that alerts the newbies.

i have also seen some developers say they want to "test" their application but i am not yet convinced that they need large amounts since i have not seen any actual test that couldn't be done in another way without even needing any coins!

What about mining them? Is much hashpower needed or they can be mined with a PC?
Are there public pools available?

Absurdly, mining testnet bitcoins is really expensive. Currently, it has a difficulty of 61681740.29071233 which means it has a target of:

Your odds of generating such hash are ~0.00000000000000037% or 1 in ~264,925,099,745,189,347. This isn't meant to be accomplished from a CPU/GPU. You'll need to work on a pool, but your rewards won't be big. Currently, each block generates only 0.1 tBTC.

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If you want some tBTC to make testings, I'm running a forum faucet: [Merit] [Faucet] Hey Bitcoiners! Wanna try out the lightning network? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5359454.msg57912622#msg57912622)

To be honest; I was wondering about mining tBTC myself a while back and I was astonished how the difficulty can be so high, even though there is no monetary reward for mining it. Is there any good reason why so many miners are apparently mining it? Or maybe it just has a different difficulty target / other parameters that were chosen?

They must have an incentive. I can't really believe that paying the hosting of a faucet website plus the mining costs are less than the ad revenue, but they must have a profit somehow, otherwise they wouldn't mine. That profit may not be translated into money.

It has the same difficulty parameters. Check chainparams.cpp#L180 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/927586990eb9bc8403a3831247847bdd3bf60423/src/chainparams.cpp#L180).

There is "testnet 4" called signet that is used now, because of blockstorms and other testnet issues. Getting large amount of signet coins is easier than testnet coins, so testing in signet should be easier. Also, the only reason why someone would need huge amounts of that coins is just for paying minimum transaction fees. But assuming zero satoshi outputs and one satoshi per byte fees, that means every 0.01 tBTC is enough to create 1 MB of test transactions. That means 2.5 tBTC is enough to send 250 MB of test transactions. But then, does someone really need to put 250 MB on-chain? Or maybe that amount of data could be lowered by using Lightning Network inside testnet?

Interesting thought; however I'm not sure what else could motivate them.. Do you have anything particular in mind (even if just pure speculation)?

True, I would for sure use signet e.g. for developing applications that run on Bitcoin. When I last did something like that, signet wasn't out yet, so I haven't tried it myself so far - not sure if it has some limitation that would incentivize using testnet instead. But if it allows to do everything that's possible on testnet, there's not much use for that anymore, right?

Regarding the name: I find it good that it's not called testnet4, because it's actually really not a 'new testnet' :D It has a few notable changes and is not just a newly setup 'testnet' with new genesis block, like testnet 1 through 3 were.

Well they have to either sell them in a market or use them in a way to have a greater income than outcome. Since I don't believe in the latter, I'd bet that there're people who buy them. Still, at the moment each block gives a tiny amount of coins, but it's too expensive. I can't really speculate anything farer.

I remember I had created this thread back when I had more, similar queries: What's the point of mining testnet bitcoins? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5312854.msg56209180#msg56209180)

The only serious limitation in signet I can think of is mining. You can only get coins from faucets created by signet developers. You cannot mine a single block on your own. Or rather: you can mine it, but you cannot sign it. Also, you can do one block reorg, because nonce is not signed, but then the next signed block will resolve that and all nodes will follow the right chain.

Here's relevant post. IMO their motivation is either data collection or disrupt Bitcoin development. Claiming "free" token/coin usually require your email address and accessing their website (which means they obtain your browser fingerprint). On extreme case, they might ask for KYC verification.

Data collection would mean they get really a lot of money for a few stats about their site's visitors. Again, not sure a few ads and browser information is really worth more than mining and giving away worthless test coins. Disrupting BTC development makes a bit more sense to me since it's not monetary, like BlackHat said. I have had a small web search for 'buying testnet coins' and it yielded nothing, so I don't think that's how they make their money back.

Yes, it's true, but on the other hand - let's say I'm developing a miner and I want to test it. The difficulty on testnet is probably way too high to get quick and consistent results to see if my driver and software is working fine, anyway. Then I would probably just setup regtest and mine in there. (not sure if this is possible but I think you can mine on regtest)

It is possible even if you use CPU for mining, but when I tried it, I had a lot of stale blocks, because the difficulty was too easy and mining was faster than sending blocks to the clients.

My best guess is that testnet is used to test custom mining software, and any improvements and/or bugfixes to mining software. It may also be used to test things intended to reduce orphaned blocks of the miner.

Can't you just increase the difficulty? Actually, it should self-adjust in Bitcoin, after 2016 blocks.

Okay, this makes the most sense to me right now! I imagine Bitmain and the other ASIC manufacturers all pre-test their hardware for a bit of time before shipping it. Especially during the development of new generation miners, they might not want to use mainnet directly, so they point those beasts towards the testnet. Sounds plausible!

It is fixed to 0x207fffff for regtest, you can try mining 10k blocks by running: "generatetoaddress 10000 YourAddress" and check difficulty for the latest block.

Mm right, that's a pity. If / when I'll be building and testing my own miner, I will then probably just change that constant and recompile it so that I can achieve e.g. a 1 minute block time to verify that the device is working as expected. But it would be cool if it was self-adjusting like mainnet every 2016 blocks. Maybe even with an optional flag that sets the block time target (e.g. 1 minute for testing purposes instead of 10).

We have 4 networks (I'm not familiar with Signet so I will skip it).
- MainNet where difficulty adjusts each 2016 blocks
- TestNet where difficulty adjusts each 2016 blocks but on every block the time is checked and if there weren't any new blocks in the past 20 minutes it falls down to minimum difficulty = 1
- RegTest where there is no difficulty adjustment and the target stays at lowest value to allow blocks to be mined within seconds
Each of these networks serve a different purpose, eg. TestNet is there to mimic the MainNet but at the same time we don't want to cause a huge gap between blocks if difficulty were high and nobody was mining it anymore. RegTest is there to allow you to quickly acquire any amount of [test]bitcoin and be able to test anything without needing to experience a bottleneck caused by mining.