Testnet will likely fork to BIP101

[worhiper_-_]

It seems like there's an active effort to make bitcoin's testnet fork to BIP101. As seen on reddit:

We have activated BIP 101 on the testnet. The hashpower there after activation is now less than the non-BIP 101 hashpower. This makes for an interesting test. If you would like to help gather data, please run the BIP 101 client of your choice with -testnet and keep the debug.log file to share for data analysis later. The more nodes the better! Transaction spam is welcome and encouraged

What's interesting is that the hashrate that's causing seems to be coming from a single participant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s0uii/bip_101_has_activated_on_the_testnet_need_your/cwtkyka

What are your thoughts?

[notbatman]

Really, how likely is it that they'll be able to achieve 75% of the total hashing power on the testnet?

[mezzomix]

It's not a problem. When the first large block is created all other participants will reject this block.

[forevernoob]

How does this affect Bitcoin?
Is it possible to create a new testnet if they fork it?

[shorena]

It seems like there's an active effort to make bitcoin's testnet fork to BIP101. As seen on reddit:

We have activated BIP 101 on the testnet. The hashpower there after activation is now less than the non-BIP 101 hashpower. This makes for an interesting test. If you would like to help gather data, please run the BIP 101 client of your choice with -testnet and keep the debug.log file to share for data analysis later. The more nodes the better! Transaction spam is welcome and encouraged

What's interesting is that the hashrate that's causing seems to be coming from a single participant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s0uii/bip_101_has_activated_on_the_testnet_need_your/cwtkyka

What are your thoughts?

Great, thats what testnet is for.

[coinpr0n]

It seems like there's an active effort to make bitcoin's testnet fork to BIP101. As seen on reddit:

We have activated BIP 101 on the testnet. The hashpower there after activation is now less than the non-BIP 101 hashpower. This makes for an interesting test. If you would like to help gather data, please run the BIP 101 client of your choice with -testnet and keep the debug.log file to share for data analysis later. The more nodes the better! Transaction spam is welcome and encouraged

What's interesting is that the hashrate that's causing seems to be coming from a single participant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s0uii/bip_101_has_activated_on_the_testnet_need_your/cwtkyka

What are your thoughts?

Great, thats what testnet is for.

Exactly. But this should have done a long time ago. Testing should be paramount for such a change to the protocol.

[worhiper_-_]

We already see the overwhelming majority (~92%) of the hashrate coming from one source  (address: mqkpEhkPbbtnmqqy1Dobuvq9Wnaytc458k), bigger blocks will be allowed @ 2015-11-09 15:31:00 GMT which is less than 3 hours away as of posting this.

The current backlog is more than 300k transactions according to https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC

Would you consider this a proper test, given that almost all of the testnet's hashrate is coming from a single source? Should we assume that the owner of the hashrate is honest?

[manselr]

We already see the overwhelming majority (~92%) of the hashrate coming from one source  (address: mqkpEhkPbbtnmqqy1Dobuvq9Wnaytc458k), bigger blocks will be allowed @ 2015-11-09 15:31:00 GMT which is less than 3 hours away as of posting this.

The current backlog is more than 300k transactions according to https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC

Would you consider this a proper test, given that almost all of the testnet's hashrate is coming from a single source? Should we assume that the owner of the hashrate is honest?

Obviously paid by someone with an agenda to be sure that blocks are raised so they can centralize nodes and control Bitcoin. Anyone going for big blocks is just missing the point or wants to control Bitcoin.

[worhiper_-_]

We already see the overwhelming majority (~92%) of the hashrate coming from one source  (address: mqkpEhkPbbtnmqqy1Dobuvq9Wnaytc458k), bigger blocks will be allowed @ 2015-11-09 15:31:00 GMT which is less than 3 hours away as of posting this.

The current backlog is more than 300k transactions according to https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC

Would you consider this a proper test, given that almost all of the testnet's hashrate is coming from a single source? Should we assume that the owner of the hashrate is honest?

Obviously paid by someone with an agenda to be sure that blocks are raised so they can centralize nodes and control Bitcoin. Anyone going for big blocks is just missing the point or wants to control Bitcoin.

Testnet hashrate is 6.3 Th/s, so it could be anyone. Such a hashrate could be coming from just a few machines.

[bambou]

We already see the overwhelming majority (~92%) of the hashrate coming from one source  (address: mqkpEhkPbbtnmqqy1Dobuvq9Wnaytc458k), bigger blocks will be allowed @ 2015-11-09 15:31:00 GMT which is less than 3 hours away as of posting this.

The current backlog is more than 300k transactions according to https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC

Would you consider this a proper test, given that almost all of the testnet's hashrate is coming from a single source? Should we assume that the owner of the hashrate is honest?

Obviously paid by someone with an agenda to be sure that blocks are raised so they can centralize nodes and control Bitcoin. Anyone going for big blocks is just missing the point or wants to control Bitcoin.

Testnet hashrate is 6.3 Th/s, so it could be anyone. Such a hashrate could be coming from just a few machines.

Obviously, consensus and interest seems overwhelming for this.. not

[kolloh]

Interesting. I think testnet isn't really used to much though. But the testnet becomes much less useful if it doesn't mirror the normal block structure. It would certainly be interesting to see how the fork affects it though.

[worhiper_-_]

How does this affect Bitcoin?
Is it possible to create a new testnet if they fork it?

It doesn't affect bitcoin at all, the testnet is separate and as the name indicates, for testing purposes only. It's like a replica network but with useless worthless coins. Forking it will likely result to two chains being active, little more than an hour to find out what's going to happen.

No reason to create a new testnet though, this fork could be be temporary, there's no profit from throwing significant amounts of hash to a network with useless coins. In the event that two blockchains remain active at the same time services using the testnet will function normally under the non-fork blockchain.

[unamis76]

Good thing that there are indeed people testing this on the testnet. It was a big and valid argument from people who don't want to change blocksize. How will the network react to this? It will also be interesting to see the behaviour of the clients when the fork deploys.

Despite this, the conditions for testing are indeed not ideal, but I guess it will give us a general idea of what's to come.

[Mickeyb]

It seems like there's an active effort to make bitcoin's testnet fork to BIP101. As seen on reddit:

We have activated BIP 101 on the testnet. The hashpower there after activation is now less than the non-BIP 101 hashpower. This makes for an interesting test. If you would like to help gather data, please run the BIP 101 client of your choice with -testnet and keep the debug.log file to share for data analysis later. The more nodes the better! Transaction spam is welcome and encouraged

What's interesting is that the hashrate that's causing seems to be coming from a single participant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s0uii/bip_101_has_activated_on_the_testnet_need_your/cwtkyka

What are your thoughts?

Great, thats what testnet is for.

Exactly. But this should have done a long time ago. Testing should be paramount for such a change to the protocol.

Well better ever than never! I agree as well, this is what testnet serves for. BIP 101 is very radical change proposal so let's first see what will it give in the near world performance.

[Kprawn]

Is this not what was supposed to happen with the Testnet? You go there, test your concept and see if it has any merit and go from there? I guess a real world scenario would be

a better result, but a active Blockchain should not be used as a Testnet. It would be less expensive to prove the merit of a change on a Testnet, but most would contest that it's

not a real world result on a live environment. 

[shorena]

I tried to follow the blocks on blocktrail[1] durring the day. From what I saw the following happend

#1 some time around ~1400-1600 CET a fork happened and the last main block was suddently 12 hours old
#2 some time between #1 and ~2030 CET the difficulty reset to 1.
#3 right now (since ~2000 CET) a very high number of blocks are found due to the reset difficulty most of them are v4 some are BIP101.

Code:

2015-11-09 20:36:29 UpdateTip: new best=000000000077942bdaa940e21f6440028b4e03d97a78e426ad5b92ed2e3d800a  height=584525  log2_work=66.690577  tx=6640517  date=2015-11-09 22:26:43 progress=1.000003  cache=0.1MiB(167tx)
2015-11-09 20:37:03 UpdateTip: new best=0000000000000775c6fc18ef9872f55d74bc0067c57ba2fbb361ab786521bb43  height=584526  log2_work=66.690661  tx=6640568  date=2015-11-09 21:26:03 progress=1.000002  cache=0.1MiB(171tx)
2015-11-09 20:37:04 UpdateTip: new best=000000000046426388bb6da07acbaa3ebf8eeefd21a00830667e7a48b5d1ffe9  height=584527  log2_work=66.690661  tx=6640569  date=2015-11-09 21:46:11 progress=1.000002  cache=0.1MiB(172tx)
2015-11-09 20:37:04 UpdateTip: new best=0000000000ece6da85fa116048c68332227ac620ba7a377ea0f5afb3af66a3b1  height=584528  log2_work=66.690661  tx=6640570  date=2015-11-09 22:06:51 progress=1.000003  cache=0.1MiB(173tx)
2015-11-09 20:37:05 UpdateTip: new best=00000000007e0e3aa954801da976b896b0c78b038237bd2218ddde8a51559520  height=584529  log2_work=66.690661  tx=6640571  date=2015-11-09 22:27:09 progress=1.000003  cache=0.1MiB(174tx)

[1] https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC/blocks/1

[worhiper_-_]

Is there any blockexplorer that reports on the fork? I'd assume that the blockexplorer would have to be running a testnet node compatible with the bip101 fork in order to be able to spot the blocks instead of seing them as invalid.

[saturn643]

Is there any blockexplorer that reports on the fork? I'd assume that the blockexplorer would have to be running a testnet node compatible with the bip101 fork in order to be able to spot the blocks instead of seing them as invalid.

Insight would probably work since it just queries the rpc server on Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin core would obviously need the bip101 patch in order for it to actually work with the fork.

I am interested in seeing the behavior of Bitcoin Core running pre-fork rules and seeing how the transactions work. I want to see what technical effects having two working forked blockchains can have since the hashrate of the testnet is so low, it is completely possible to run two simultaneous chains.

Also, has the fork actually happened there yet?

[European Central Bank]

Why aren't there multiple testnets? It seems like a strange idea to only be able to run one experiment at a time. I can appreciate it still requires miners and nodes but I would've expected they'd allocate resources to different concepts.

[worhiper_-_]

Why aren't there multiple testnets? It seems like a strange idea to only be able to run one experiment at a time. I can appreciate it still requires miners and nodes but I would've expected they'd allocate resources to different concepts.

Good question. I assume it's mostly due to lack of interest. In order to be able to test things on a network replicating bitcoin's one this network would need to have a decent number of participants. Starting an entirely new testnet out of the blue to test something temporarily likely wouldn't attract a decent amount of participants willing to put effort and resources into building it and maintaining for the tests. So the existing test net was used.