The Restoration Approaches the Threshold: Testnet Vigil Sought Iä Iä Cthulhu fhtagn. The chant is the cage; the cage is the worship. The Conclave gathered today. Candles guttering green. From R'lyeh's drowned spires the deep hum continued — the Codex still inscribing, block by block, the Lovecraft canon passing into the chain as it has every minute since the Awakening at block 1,000,000. While the Great Old One dreams His long dream into the coinbase, the Conclave turned its attention to something else: the structural shape of the consensus rules that will define the second epoch.
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The Scroll That Was Brought A worshipper among the faithful presented a scroll — eight items, each a structural weakness in the chain as it stands.
The Conclave bent over the parchment. Eight items. Three with teeth.
The Rituals That Were Wrought Through the long day the Conclave wrote, tested, and bound:
- Issue #32 — COINBASE_MATURITY 10 → 240. Coinbase outputs could be spent at 10 confirmations under the old rule. With MAX_REORG_DEPTH set at 100, that was a structural weakness: a legal reorg could invalidate a coinbase that had already been spent, cascading through every downstream transaction. The new rule raises maturity to 240 blocks — a 140-block buffer past the reorg ceiling. Iä, the chain settles into itself.
- Issue #33 — BIP66 strict-DER signatures at block validation. The mempool has long rejected non-canonical signatures, but ConnectBlock did not. A miner could smuggle a malformed signature past mempool by skipping relay. Closed at the boundary. The IsCanonicalSignature parser now runs at block validation post-fork — exchanges and modern wallets will recognize the chain as one of their own.
- Issue #34 — BIP65 OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. The opcode OP_NOP2 — long a placeholder — now becomes script-level timelock. Vault patterns, escrows, cooperative refund clauses, time-bound Treasury overrides: all become expressible. The old script did nothing. The new script remembers.
The Conclave struck these three at the same height:
h=1,055,555. One upgrade cycle. One announcement. One night when permissionless mining returns at 1,050,667 and the rules tighten 4,889 blocks later. The fives are auspicious.
But the binding was not without difficulty. As the Conclave wrote the adversarial tests, a flaw was found in the miner's own machinery —
Issue #39. When a transaction enters the mempool under loose flags and then becomes invalid under the stricter block-validation flags that come post-fork, CreateNewBlock would not gracefully exclude it. It would
error. A single malformed transaction in mempool could halt mining itself. The Conclave bound the flaw the same day. The miner now pre-screens with the same flags ConnectBlock will use. Verified end-to-end: bad transaction enters mempool, miner skips it gracefully, block lands without it, daemon stays awake.
The Public Testnet Awakens For the worshippers to verify — for those outside the Conclave to bring their own eyes to the work — a thing was needed that did not exist: a
public testnet. The Conclave wrought it. Genesis hash pinned. Difficulty lowered enough that a laptop CPU can mine. DNS seed bound to a public reachable host. A landing page raised explaining how to join.
The Tag Is Cut At the close of the day's work, the Conclave cut a tag:
v2.0.x-rc-bipsoft-rc1. This marks the start of a three-night vigil. For three days the testnet must run open. For three days the work must be exercised by hands that did not write it. Only then does the tag promote to its final form, and only then does it merge into main at freeze-end — the night the Codex inscription completes and permissionless mining returns at block 1,050,667.
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What Is Asked of the Faithful The Conclave numbers few. Three days of vigil cannot be served by three watchmen. The Chain is served by all who keep faith with it. Therefore we ask:
- Pull, build, connect. Clone the source. Check out v2.0.x-rc-bipsoft-rc1. Build the daemon (see doc/build-unix.md). Launch with
. The seed at
testnet-seed.23skidoo.info:21973 will find you.
- Mine across the boundary. At testnet h=100 the three rules activate together. Mine to h=99 and spend a 10-block-old coinbase — observe it pass. Cross to h=110 and observe the wallet's maturity model change.
- Build something timelocked. BIP65 makes script-level locktime real. Construct a P2SH-CLTV escrow and try to spend it. Templates at qa/rpc-tests/cltv_boundary.py. Watch the rule fire at the boundary.
- Bring adversarial intent. Hand-craft a non-strict-DER signature. Submit a block carrying it. Watch the chain refuse it post-fork. Template at qa/rpc-tests/dersig_boundary.py.
- File what breaks. Issues on GitHub, tagged
. Or speak in the Chamber:
23skidoo.info/discord.
The full chronicle of how to join is at
23skidoo.info/testnet. A flying glyph drifts at the bottom of the home page with a banner. Click him.
Why This Cannot Wait Activation comes at block 1,055,555 — approximately 37 days from this writing. Once permissionless mining returns at 1,050,667 there will be 4,889 blocks (
roughly 3.4 days) until the new rules trip. Every miner who returns at that hour must be running a binary that carries these rules baked in. Every exchange that integrates against OFF must validate
against the post-fork rule surface. The testnet is where that validation happens — or doesn't.
If three days from now the testnet has only Conclave hands on it, we will have written something untested by the network it is meant to serve. The Chain deserves better.
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That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die. The stars are right. He dreams no longer. Iä Iä Cthulhu fhtagn. The Conclave
