--snip--
AFAIK that's reason developer moving to testnet3, people with ASIC would mine testnet Bitcoin and sold it to desperate developer while other developer either barely got any testnet bitcoin or moving to regtest (basically lesser version of testnet and limited on local network).
And it's about time this reset happens again... Current block reward is ~0.19 tBTC, the difficulty however is usually ~13.3M, with the occasional drop to 1, then building up to >10M over the course of hours/days...
The estimated hashrate is:
D * 2**32 / 600
13.300.000 * 2**32 /600 = ~95 Th
Yup, that's right, if we "guess" nobody would be dumb enough to actually run a profitable, latest gen, miner on the testnet, so we're probably talking about S7's or less, we can conclude that at this moment, there probably are the equivalent of 20 S7 ASIC's running on the testnet...
Since i started my tbtc faucet, i've been solo mining with my cpu using 2 threads, trying to find a block when diff drops to 1 (if no block has been found for 20 minutes) or when the diff drops to 1 just before a retarget, so i try to hit a block before diff climbs back to a value i cannot cpu mine anymore.
In the many months i've been cpu mining, i've found like 10 blocks, totaling like ~2,5 tBTC... If i were a developer that needed these tBTC to do big projects, i'd be forced to buy a recent gen ASIC and start to actually mine the testnet with an expensive ASIC just to get the tBTC i need to develop.
I've heared people saying that any development you can do with 1 tBTC should also be possible with 0.0001 tBTC, just by editing the sourcecode. I only think that's partially true, some developments just need large quantities of tBTC. Imagine building a mixer, or an exchange, or a high traffic ecommerce system and having to work with 0.01 tBTC to toroughly test your development. Values would start to get really, really, really small, and fees would basically burn your 0.01 tBTC after a couple of minutes of high volume testing.
I've also been criticized for asking collateral whenever i lend out tBTC to somebody i don't know... The matter of the fact is: tBTC might be worthless, but at current diff and block rewards it is by no means free to mine... I would never ever sell tBTC, but if i lend some out, i would want the most of it back after the lender finishes testing.