Whats the current state of testnet3 vs testnet4?

[takuma sato]

I need to do some testing and I would like to know what is recommended to use right now, testnet3 or testnet4? Whenever I've asked this I remember people saying, do not use testnet4, it's very experiment, they are doing fringe things on it, and so on, and said testnet3 is more reliable.

Then other's said, do not use tesnet3, it's deprecated, and soon Bitcoin Core will stop supporting it, so you are wasting your time downloading and maintaining it.

I like to maintain a full blockchain for testnet because pruned mode do not allow for some tests. Testnet4 is last time I checked, substantially smaller, so that would save space.

Getting coins is also important. Id prefer availibility on faucets than someone here handling you coins for privacy.

So what would you recommend right now, testnet3 or testnet4? And please, mention which websites have good liquidty to some coins. Last time I check, I was only able to find some on coinfaucet, but would be good to have some alternatives in case they run out.

[OmegaStarScream]

It might be a good idea to just use the latest network. This is a good article[1] you may want to look into if you want to get more familiar with the differences between the different test networks. For the faucets:

- Mempool.space does support testnet4 as mentioned in the article[2], but I'm not sure which criteria one must meet to be able to use it. Simply making an account would just return "Your account does not allow you to access the faucet".

- Altquick[2]'s faucet supports testnet4, 3 and Signet[3].

- Another one I found is this[4]. It's not working at the moment (and not sure since when) but it might be worth keeping an eye on.

Alternatively, if you need some large amounts, you may want to make a request on the forums, or Reddit. Maybe someone will be willing to help and give you some.

[1] https://www.spark.money/tools/bitcoin-testnet-faucet-guide
[2] https://mempool.space/testnet4/faucet
[3] https://altquick.com/faucet/?q=TBTC4
[4] https://faucet.testnet4.dev/

[takuma sato]

It might be a good idea to just use the latest network. This is a good article[1] you may want to look into if you want to get more familiar with the differences between the different test networks.

Mempool.space does support testnet4 as mentioned in the article, but I'm not sure which criteria one must meet to be able to use it. Simply making an account would just return "Your account does not allow you to access the faucet".

Altquick[2]'s faucet supports testnet4, 3 and Signet[2].

Another one I found is this[3]. It's not working at the moment (and not sure since when) but it might be worth keeping an eye on.

Alternatively, if you need some large amounts, you may want to make a request on the forums, or Reddit. Maybe someone will be willing to help and give you some.

[1] https://www.spark.money/tools/bitcoin-testnet-faucet-guide
[2] https://mempool.space/testnet4/faucet
[3] https://altquick.com/faucet/?q=TBTC4

Thanks, I will give testnet4 a try. Has anyone synced a testnet4 full node without prune and assumevalid enabled? How big is your blocks folder? Also, did it took a lot of I/O work to sync? because I remember reading something along the lines of, "testnet4 is used for experiments that bloat this procedure a lot because of things like ordinals-type of scripts and so on". Not sure if that is true. I guess im going to try to sync it myself and see what happens.I already had problems syncing the regular blockchain on my laptop and had to use my desktop computer because it would run out of RAM, and it required several flushing events. Even on the desktop it happened a couple of times. I made a thread about this here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5592968.msg67102751#msg67102751

It would be great if Bitcoin was only used for regular transactions to avoid these things but what can you do at this point. Most people don't care or realize that the number of laptops that can run open source BIOS is limited and often old hardware and non-monetary usages are pricing these machines out of the network.

[LoyceV]

I need to do some testing and I would like to know what is recommended to use right now, testnet3 or testnet4?

Both have their flaws: 3 has regular blockstorms, 4 has reorgs and empty blocks.

Id prefer availibility on faucets than someone here handling you coins for privacy.

If you want your test transactions to be private, you probably shouldn't use a blockchain

Thanks, I will give testnet4 a try. Has anyone synced a testnet4 full node without prune and assumevalid enabled? How big is your blocks folder? Also, did it took a lot of I/O work to sync?

It's 3 GB blocks, and 1 GB chainstate. Nothing to worry about.
Sorry, see below. It turns out mine was pruned.

PM me an address and I'll send you a coin (testnet4). Or 100. Doesn't matter

[nc50lc]

-snip- Has anyone synced a testnet4 full node without prune and assumevalid enabled? How big is your blocks folder? Also, did it took a lot of I/O work to sync?

My testnet4 blockchain is at 13GB right now, actual blocks directory size is at 12.7GiB.

getblockchaininfo:

Code:

{
  "chain": "testnet4",
  "blocks": 155027,
  "headers": 155027,
  "bestblockhash": "0000000000c6069cf027a59f9be1b9c6220c24c7602b2b8ef0f7a5c6ada07810",
  "bits": "1d00ffff",
  "target": "00000000ffff0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "difficulty": 1,
  "time": 1791089788,
  "mediantime": 1791083783,
  "verificationprogress": 1,
  "initialblockdownload": false,
  "chainwork": "000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ea85300d8c2d362ae06",
  "size_on_disk": 13641748547,
  "pruned": false,
  "warnings": [
  ]
}

I didn't disable -assumevalid but AFAIK, it wont affect your IO that much.
CPU on the other hand, will need more resources than usual.

For periodical cache flushes, 1GB of UTXO set that'll be written to disk roughly every hour isn't going to be as heavy as mainnet.

[DaveF]

Also, keep in mind you can use regtest:
https://developer.bitcoin.org/examples/testing.html

Bot 99% of testing it works just as well if not better then testnet.

Once you have it working there, THEN you bring it to testnet (if you think it's even needed).

Then you deploy.

Think of regtest and alpha and beta testing, testnet as RC testing and then live.

Just my view.

-Dave

[athanred]

Whats the current state of testnet3 vs testnet4?

All three testnets are altcoins, and they are traded for real BTCs:

https://altquick.com/market/bitcoin-testnet3-bitcoin/
https://altquick.com/market/bitcoin-testnet4-bitcoin/
https://altquick.com/market/bitcoin-signet-bitcoin/

So what would you recommend right now, testnet3 or testnet4?

Regtest, because they probably won't list a network with paper-and-pencil difficulty. Or a custom signet. Everything else is now an altcoin, so if you use it for real testing, then you risk touching real funds, and that could have some unintended consequences.

It might be a good idea to just use the latest network.

Then use testnet5. As long as they didn't list it yet, it should be good enough: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/35861

Has anyone synced a testnet4 full node without prune and assumevalid enabled?

Not only that. People mined hundreds of thousands of tBTCs in testnet4 on their Windows 98 CPUs, and already sold a lot of them for real BTCs, when that coin was listed on exchange, because then it stopped being useful for testing. Now, you can use testnet5. Then, they will list it at some point in time, and then developers will sell everything, and move to testnet6. And so on.

It is sad to see testnets being turned into pump-and-dump altcoins, but well: if exchanges want to list them, then developers can keep launching new coins, and dumping the old ones. At least it has a side effect of funding the development, but it is just a consequence of altcoins being in such a bad state, that testnets, designed to be worthless, are worth more in practice, than some other serious altcoins, only because of testnets being included into Bitcoin Core.

testnet4 is used for experiments that bloat this procedure a lot because of things like ordinals-type of scripts and so on

It doesn't really matter. If anything, data pushes only make nodes faster, because OP_CHECKSIG, and processing real payments is more computationally expensive. Practically speaking, signet had some tests of hard-to-handle blocks, related to BIP-54, but testnet5 fixes it from the start, and signet tests were not permanent anyway, because slow blocks were reorged.

I already had problems syncing the regular blockchain on my laptop

Syncing the mainchain is much more difficult. I am at 85%, maybe I will sync it before the end of October, if I will be lucky. I started in June, and I am slowly getting there.

It is much easier to sync any testnet, because these chains are much smaller, and contain much less signatures, or other time-consuming scripts.

It would be great if Bitcoin was only used for regular transactions to avoid these things

If we would have the chain, where P2PK would be the only allowed address type, then it would be much harder to sync, and we would still have JPEGs.

the number of laptops that can run open source BIOS is limited

Of course. But some people, who claim running a node is easy, will tell you to trust, that UEFI is safe, and you should just get a better hardware, without caring about your BIOS being Open Source or not. Anyway, maybe they are right, because there is more code, that is in use, than you could read in a lifetime.

[nobswebdev]

I am using testnet4 for my project and it sometimes take long for tx to get confirmed. I don't have comparison to testnet3, because I never used it.