KNC, 100% of their hashing is currently going into their own pocket.

[itod]

I would not buy a miner that hadn't proven itself mining on the real net. Testnet is not the same.

lol what's the difference? If you wrote something like this I bet you would not be able to tell by the cgminer screen on which net you are currently on. Hint: the only difference is the difficulty value. Totally unimportant for the hashrate or any other miner functionality.

Bitcoinrama already admitted they were paying some hacker (who helped them last minute debugging) with that mined coins, which is shady as hell. Would it be legal to do if that machine was not a BTC miner but, for instance, printing press instead? Of course it would be illegal.

[Syke]

Mining testnet is a very similar workload to mining shares on a pool. If you were saying you wanted to see a solved high difficulty block— that would be another matter. A technically superior test would be to mine recently completed mainnet blocks to verify that the device would actually submit solutions.  As it'll be quite awesome when, intentionally or otherwise, some mining asic has a "bug" that causes it to lose some percentage of its full solutions but not its shares... widespread deployment of such a device would probably put every pool out of business in a few days.

[Aside: I'm only bothering to reply to this thread because it's currently on top]

Then let's keep it on top!

"very similar". See, "very similar" isn't good enough for me. I have a lot of money invested in my miners. Do you ship new versions of Bitcoin without running them on the live network? Until there is a test suite that verifies the protocol completely, there are all sorts of issues that could crop up on main net that don't show up on test net. Test net is a good starting place, but it doesn't offer everything that main net does.

[Nemo1024]

I would not buy a miner that hadn't proven itself mining on the real net. Testnet is not the same.

lol what's the difference? If you wrote something like this I bet you would not be able to tell by the cgminer screen on which net you are currently on. Hint: the only difference is the difficulty value. Totally unimportant for the hashrate or any other miner functionality.

Bitcoinrama already admitted they were paying some hacker (who helped them last minute debugging) with that mined coins, which is shady as hell. Would it be legal to do if that machine was not a BTC miner but, for instance, printing press instead? Of course it would be illegal.

Not "some hacker", but their employee.
Your printing press analogy is wrong - if someone working at a government mint solved a particularly difficult problem, they'd probably get a bonus on top of their salary. This 1 BTC is the same.

[RoadStress]

LET THIS USELESS THREAD DIE PLEASE!

[YipYip]

LET THIS USELESS THREAD DIE PLEASE!

STop It NOW ...lolz

[Bitcoinorama]

Testnet - screenshot pinged to me form dev's android app.:

[gmaxwell]

Locking thread because it's both run its course and they've actually got hardware in people's hands now!