What's up with the need for tBTC?

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

I don't know what is tBTC but after few minute to do research, I know it is testnet bitcoin.

I am confusing and don't know which wallet is the lightest and best wallets to use testnet bitcoin. Would you mind helping me to choose the lightest wallet for tBTC? My laptop does not have too much free storage space.

[charlie137]

I don't know what is tBTC but after few minute to do research, I know it is testnet bitcoin.

I am confusing and don't know which wallet is the lightest and best wallets to use testnet bitcoin. Would you mind helping me to choose the lightest wallet for tBTC? My laptop does not have too much free storage space.

usually you spin the core and/or electrum, depends on your needs. current testnet generation (v3) is around 25GB in size.

[NotATether]

I haven't heared about anybody getting scammed with tBTC (yet). Seems like a strange attack method. I mean, you have to persuade somebody to either run a wallet that's clearly marked as a testnet wallet, or you have to convince them to start the wallet with a parameter that clearly says "testnet" or you have to convice them to run a "fake" wallet... Next to this, you'd have to convice your victim that he/she cannot use a normal block explorer. And you have to convice them that testnet is just like main net, and he has to ignore the "test" in front of everything, and the warnings everywhere, and the posts on forums, blogs,... that indicate that tBTC has zero value.

It just feels like a criminal would take the path of least resistance... Why scam somebody with tBTC? If you have to get them to run an "alternative" wallet, or a standard wallet in an "alternative" way, why not just push a completely fake wallet on them, one that's basically just showing fake transactions that get pulled from a central server? Or use some crapcoin or token and sell it as BTC.

I'm not saying it's impossible, since you guys have actually heared from such attacks i'm not doubting these kind of things do happen... It just seems unlikely to have caused such an "explosion" in tBTC demand

I also don't get it. I'm interpreting this as people stealing tBTC from victims. Or is it that they "trade" BTC with them for tBTC?

• Do i tell new people i no longer lend out tBTC.
• Do i start doing "backgroundchecks" that cost a lot of time and effort, especially for a free service.
• Do i keep lending out tBTC, eventough part of it might be used to scam... But then again, allmost everything you lend to anybody can be used to scam in one way or another...

I haven't got a clue... Does the good outweigh the bad, is it worth my effort,... 

Perhaps you can impose a small tBTC limit so that even in the case that people try to scam with it, they won't be able to pull off a lot of money. Something like the equivalent of $20, if it were real money.

[n0nce]

If somebody needs testnet coins, it should be as simple as
=> editing bitcoin.conf on your testnet node (which you are running anyways, since you're developing a project for which you need tBTC)
=> running minerd for 1 hour
=> waiting untill your mined tBTC is mature
=> having enough tBTC for your project, donating the rest to a faucet when you're done

However, i've calculated that at this point in time there is > 100 Th running on the testnet (115 Th iirc, i did the calculations a couple days ago). No home cpu miner can ever compete with this... If this continues, a developer would actually need to buy an ASIC or rent hashrate to get enough tBTC to test his/her project, since nobody knows who's hoarding tBTC, and people with faucets (like me) also have a very hard time getting tBTC to give away for free.

That's actually possible, though! With home CPU most probably, too. I just mined 27 blocks over the last ~24h using a single Compac F; those were always 1-difficulty-blocks, so it should have been possible with CPU, just as well. Testnet difficulty drops to 1 after 20 minutes without new blocks, so developers who need tBTC for their project can literally get a full coin over a day by following nullama's guides.

[pawanjain]

I run a tBTC (testnet Bitcoin) faucet, and i've publicly stated i would loan out tBTC to anybody who needs it in the past... Usually i get 2-3 messages per month requesting "random" amount of tBTC from newbies...

After I explain the collateral I estimated a couple months ago will no longer suffice because the difficulty on the testnet rose from 10M to >16M, the block reward went from <0.4 to <0.2 tBTC/block and the price per Th on miningrigrentals rose aswell since my posts about loaning out tBTC, they drop the subject never to be heared off again.

However, yesterday i received 16!!! messages asking for loads of tBTC (most of them in the ~100 tBTC range). The messages were evenly spread between bitcointalk PM's, my 2 public email addresses and my twitter inbox.

This night, 2 more messages, resulting in 18 requests in little over 24 hours...

I'm missing something here... Anybody knows some secret I don't?

I mean, electrum has released version 4... I could understand people asking for tBTC to test out the LN on testnet... But you wouldn't need 100 tBTC for this. Other than that, i'm drawing blanks...

It can be anything. May be someone is trying to scam someone which is why they are asking for 100 tBTC.
May be someone don't know they can use fractions of tBTC and hence may be asking for 100 tBTC to test something.
May be someone wants to test more number of wallets or something but even then they wouldn't require such a huge amount of tBTC.

[panganib999]

Could be that these people, especially if they are newbies mistake tBTC for BTC and thought you were giving it out as some sort of a raffle or a giveaway. It could easily be the case considering how it takes a while for a regular person to even get a hold of what testnets are.

Or it could also be a case of people scamming people who are none the wiser about how bitcoin works. Ber months are coming and these people could've seen that they could scam other people with tBTC by saying it is BTC. If these people aren't that knowledgeable about the cryptocurrency world they might just fall for it.

All in all my friend, don't hesitate to ask them what they would use it for, maybe even decline the ones who seem fishy to you. You're the one who holds the tBTCs, you're the boss.

[LoyceV]

I just mined 27 blocks over the last ~24h using a single Compac F; those were always 1-difficulty-blocks, so it should have been possible with CPU, just as well.

Your post got me motivated, so I've been mining Testnet on CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz) for the past 19 hours. So far, not a single block mined.

Could be that these people, especially if they are newbies mistake tBTC for BTC

I've used a few Testnet wallets (when playing around with LN) that show Bitcoin's dollar value for Testnet Bitcoins. I can imagine that's confusing, and makes some people believe it has value.

[n0nce]

I just mined 27 blocks over the last ~24h using a single Compac F; those were always 1-difficulty-blocks, so it should have been possible with CPU, just as well.

Your post got me motivated, so I've been mining Testnet on CPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz) for the past 19 hours. So far, not a single block mined.

Wow, interesting!
Right now, over last 24h I got another 33 blocks.
What's your hashrate like? And do you have the node fully synced (just in case)?

I did miss the requirement of ~40GB disk space in mocaccino's guide, but it wasn't too bad; IBD went relatively quick.

[LoyceV]

Right now, over last 24h I got another 33 blocks.

I guess my CPU miner still loses from the ASICS and GPU miners, even when the difficulty is 1. Or I made a mistake somewhere.

What's your hashrate like?

I think it's 6.58Mh/s:

Code:

 bfgminer version 5.5.0-34-g866fd36f - Started: [2022-12-18 17:27:16] - [  1 day  01:23:03]
 [M]anage devices [P]ool management [S]ettings [D]isplay options                                                                                                                              [H]elp [Q]uit 
 Pool 0: 89.38.99.81         Diff:86.6M  + GBT   LU:[18:49:57]  User:loyce
 Block: ...50f75919ef686c53  Diff:86.6M (619.7T)  Started: [18:32:55]  I: 0.00 BTC/hr
 ST:10  F:0  NB:119  AS:0  BW:[807/ 13 B/s]  E:0.00  BS:155
 8            |  6.31/ 6.38/ 6.58Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 CPU 0:       | 793.7/796.3/799.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 1:       | 800.0/798.5/658.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 2:       | 799.3/793.9/752.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 3:       | 799.5/798.1/893.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 4:       |  0.80/ 0.80/ 1.32Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 5:       | 799.5/798.7/658.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 6:       | 782.2/795.5/940.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 CPU 7:       | 788.5/798.3/564.0kh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [2022-12-19 11:49:03] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 11:53:27] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 12:08:22] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 12:25:17] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 12:27:02] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 12:46:43] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 13:06:31] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 13:10:19] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 13:25:09] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 13:30:39] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block
 [2022-12-19 13:41:09] Longpoll from pool 0 detected new block

And do you have the node fully synced (just in case)?

Yes (it's only 35 GB).

I did miss the requirement of ~40GB disk space in mocaccino's guide, but it wasn't too bad; IBD went relatively quick.

I used nullama's guide.

[hZti]

What happened to all existing testnet Bitcoins anyway? Who's hoarding them?

Since they are free, people often dont bother to keep the seed words of their wallets and loose access to the coins. They simply get new coins if they need them. Since the reward is dropping and there seems to be a higher and higher demand in general it is basically impossible to get a large amount these days.

[n0nce]

Right now, over last 24h I got another 33 blocks.

I guess my CPU miner still loses from the ASICS and GPU miners, even when the difficulty is 1. Or I made a mistake somewhere.

That's one possibility. Did you have any 'accepted' (by Bitcoin Core) blocks? That maybe just didn't propagate quickly?

What's your hashrate like?

I think it's 6.58Mh/s:

Code:

 bfgminer version 5.5.0-34-g866fd36f - Started: [2022-12-18 17:27:16] - [  1 day  01:23:03]
 [M]anage devices [P]ool management [S]ettings [D]isplay options                                                                                                                              [H]elp [Q]uit 
 Pool 0: 89.38.99.81         Diff:86.6M  + GBT   LU:[18:49:57]  User:loyce
 Block: ...50f75919ef686c53  Diff:86.6M (619.7T)  Started: [18:32:55]  I: 0.00 BTC/hr
 ST:10  F:0  NB:119  AS:0  BW:[807/ 13 B/s]  E:0.00  BS:155
 8            |  6.31/ 6.38/ 6.58Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none

Indeed; around 50,000 times slower than a BM1397 chip. That means you're trying 1 hash every 166.7 nanoseconds, meanwhile the ASIC can do one hash every 3.333ps. I'm honestly not sure that you need anything much faster for a difficulty of 1.
How many tries will it take to find a valid block at this difficulty? 1 or 2 tries, no?

I know from ASICs that the driver tells the chip to go through a whole range of parameters, otherwise the overhead would be too high.
In case the CPU miner is configured similarly, maybe only asking for new work every couple of seconds; that could be a problem.

I did miss the requirement of ~40GB disk space in mocaccino's guide, but it wasn't too bad; IBD went relatively quick.

I used nullama's guide.

I may try it myself; just don't really feel like stressing my computer hardware so much.

[LoyceV]

Did you have any 'accepted' (by Bitcoin Core) blocks? That maybe just didn't propagate quickly?

I haven't seen it (and don't know how I could check). I don't expect propagation speed to be a problem.

How many tries will it take to find a valid block at this difficulty? 1 or 2 tries, no?

I don't know. If it's the difference between 166 ns and 3.3 ps, that shouldn't matter compared to pinging the rest of the internet.

I know from ASICs that the driver tells the chip to go through a whole range of parameters, otherwise the overhead would be too high.
In case the CPU miner is configured similarly, maybe only asking for new work every couple of seconds; that could be a problem.

It now makes me wonder if nullama tested it with CPU. A few seconds would indeed be far too much.

I may try it myself; just don't really feel like stressing my computer hardware so much.

If you promise to behave, I can give you access

[dansus021]

damn I also curios about this one since bitcoin doesn't have popular smart contract like ethereum or binance smart chain. Or maybe they are try scam people, but if this the case is it too obvious.

I usually ask dozen of testnet coin on eth, bsc, polygon or other form of EVM chain to use test DecentralizedApp but I'm never seen dApp in tBTC

[xzy887]

damn I also curios about this one since bitcoin doesn't have popular smart contract like ethereum or binance smart chain. Or maybe they are try scam people, but if this the case is it too obvious.

I usually ask dozen of testnet coin on eth, bsc, polygon or other form of EVM chain to use test DecentralizedApp but I'm never seen dApp in tBTC

Like you I have never seen this tBTC DApp. And I have no idea about this tBTC. After coming here, I thought this is a coin like Bitcoin. If I'm not wrong, then what I think is true? I want to know your thoughts about this tBTC.