The question is what do they need all these testnet coins for?
It's true, they are getting it for free in exchange of their shitty token but is it really worth all the hassle?
Can it be used to perform an attack against the testnet network?
Maybe they are just planning to sell it for developers after draining all other resources.
Unfortunately people can disrupt stuff at no direct gain to themselves.
It's like, you want to give away shitty ICO tokens. You want them mostly to go to your own people, but you also want to allow a bit of the public to participate in order to build a base of invested promoters and also as air cover to hide and justify your self-issuance.
So you tell people they can have some free coins if they send you a video of them smashing a happy-meal toy.
Someone might ask how the issuers benefit from smashing toys? Are they planning on cornering the toy market? No: They don't benefit-- it was just a limited supply thing that they could get an early jump on because they set the rules. And now all the later participants will be invested because they did work to get the 'free' tokens.
The fact that it creates an external harm such as depriving toy collectors of accesses to toys-- or in our case making it hard to get testnet coins for actual testing-- is irrelevant to the people making these decisions.
One of the reasons that externalities are often hated in public policy is that they're often extremely asymmetric: You save $10 disposing of toxic waste by dumping it and create pollution that will cost someone else $1 million to remedy.
If people working on Bitcoin can't easily get testnet coins in the future after this they'll just switch to a new testnet. For now, there is regtest which is better than testnet for most applications so it isn't super urgent.
The bigger harm from this is just the annoyance of people showing up everywhere begging for testnet coins and the negative feelings created in donors and faucet operators that their charity was exploited so someone could make a quick buck.
Kind of an interesting thought but, should we just start reporting all the threads people are posting begging for tBTC the same way we report regular begging for coins?
Yeah, report any testnet begging that doesn't have a clear description that convinces you that it isn't just someone trying to get them for profit purposes. Like if someone says, "hey, trying to test [link to their program] and could use 0.001 TBTC and some users to try it out with me" then sure, that's not a problem, and you don't need to report it... though if it sounds like they don't know about regtest, it may be useful to tell them about it.
