Sebagaimana diketahui, Testnet 4 masih termasuk belum lama dirilis (sekitar 2024 lalu,
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0094.mediawiki),
yang digadang-gadang untuk menggantikan Testnet 3 (Cikal bakal peralihannya bisa lihat tulisan Jameson Lopp di:
https://blog.lopp.net/the-block-storms-of-bitcoins-testnet/).
Namun, testnet 4 ini menyisakan banyak masalah. Diantara diskusinya bisa dilihat di thread @BlackHatCoiner:
Fixing Testnet4: proposalFor those who don't know, testnet4 is pretty much broken. CPU miners are taking advantage of the 20-min rule and there's very intense competition on who gets to broadcast the block faster. So intense, that some miners send empty blocks to gain that little advantage over bandwidth and verification time. A discussion started in the Bitcoin Development Mailing list, but it hasn't got anywhere:
https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/iVLHJ1HWhoU.
My proposal to fix testnet4 is to simply remove the 20-min limit after a certain epoch, months into the future, so that everyone has time to upgrade. Also, difficulty should also be decreased significantly after the epoch of that block (by around 5/6th) because around 5 in 6 blocks are CPU blocks, and by disabling CPU blocks, we should expect the block interval to increase significantly.
One good justification for this proposal is that the purpose of testnet is to mimic mainnet as closely as possible. It'd be good for devs to be able to mine testnet "for free", but this mindset has lead to these unintended consequences where you can't have the cake and eat it too. Having the illusion of "free mining" without the usability of a test network is far worse than having a usable test network where coins are just not free to mine.
What do you think?
April 2026 Update:Instead of disabling the min difficulty rule which would result in a hard fork, we have figured out of a smart solution that effectively disables it, but in soft fork; non-upgraded nodes follow the softfork-ed chain as long as majority of hashrate mines on upgraded clients.
https://batmanbytes.github.io/testnet4-softfork/Nah, saya lihat di GitHub Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, saat ini sudah terbit draft Testnet 5:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0095.mdUntuk diskusinya sendiri bisa lihat juga di:
https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/kGUMTxOvdJA?pli=1
