Testnet on steroids today

[dexX7]

... I'd love to know what's going on? Some serious mining power playing around?

The blocks come in within a few seconds for more than a half day now:

https://www.biteasy.com/testnet/blocks

[L0rdCha0s]

Hi! I'm Alex from BitPOS (www.bitpos.me)

I can shed some light on the recent TestNet happenings perhaps.
We control the testnet address n2U7mXV4HFumkKLt7jz8LhNqKHMszTP39c - which received approx 25,000 coins today

We run a piece of (old) mining hardware on Testnet (and have been for the past month or so), to generate coins to test our POS system, and to donate back to the Testnet faucets.

For some reason (that I have no idea of...) - we received 25,000 coins or so in the last 6 hours.  Any idea why that would be? Thus far we have been receiving maybe 50 coins a day...

[Rubber Ducky]

Haha it's fun. good time to try out testnet wallets.

[L0rdCha0s]

Anyone want some testnet coins? I've got the odd thousand spare... 

[dexX7]

Haha, thanks for the very fast response L0rdCha0s!

So you basically didn't change anything, but from one day to another this behavior emerged?

[L0rdCha0s]

Exactly correct - I nearly had a heart attack when I started the testnet client, and the coins started rolling in!

But yeah, the miner has been running for weeks, and nothing has changed... I guess the Mojo testnet faucet is about to get lucky

[Dabs]

When was the last time the testnet got rebooted?

[L0rdCha0s]

A while ago - 2011 February 2nd.

[Dabs]

What's the difficulty and/or hash rate of the testnet now?

Testnet is supposed to be for testing, so coins should be worthless. But I wonder what kind of hardware is needed to make what kind of coins. Is there a mining pool, or is everyone solo mining?

[darkfur93]

Trying to see if I can solo mine any Testnet coins. My client is 27 weeks behind. lol

[Rubber Ducky]

Anyone want some testnet coins? I've got the odd thousand spare... 

Donate to tpfaucet. That's where I get my coins when I need `em.

[deepceleron]

I reset the testnet difficulty to 1 using a bug with the testnet-specific difficulty code. The prior difficulty was ridiculous and testnet doesn't reduce in difficulty when hashrate drops the way we would expect it to reflect actual full-difficulty hashrate. Enjoy the coin bonanza. The difficulty is currently up to 1024 and will be increasing at 400% per retarget for quite a while.

[deepceleron]

I'm curious if anyone knows the purpose of a whole bunch of 0 BTC transactions with 0.00000001 fees. It is not de-dusting, it's just one address sending itself its balance minus 1 satoshi. These do not appear to be broadcast or at least accepted by peers - just one miner is making them, and usually there is one per block, but I found a block with a whole bunch of them (possibly from that miner being orphaned out a lot) https://www.biteasy.com/testnet/blocks/000000006bd3ff52f3d58686817261c0e58dcf7a28c62cd5efd8acd7b19f3e2f

Also, please mine with 0.9.3+ and don't hit the testnet network with 200000+ difficulty hardware like now - this prevents developers wanting to do test mining with proposed code from mining blocks with simple hardware. Anybody who you think will buy your testnet coins can get them from me for free.

[L0rdCha0s]

Just sent 20,000 to TP faucet.   Turning off the box now.

[shorena]

Fun times. Tested some 0 Fee TX and apparently there was someone including them and someone not. Saw 4 confirmations to go away and return in a matter of minutes. Anyway, all coins back to faucet, learned my raw TX lessons for the day

[Dabs]

I have a question: what parts of the block are unpredictable until broadcast or published? So far, I can see the following: block hash, that first (or sometimes only) transaction rewarding the miner, maybe the block time (although sort of predictable). This might be a more general question, but you testnet guys can probably answer. (I'm working on a game that needs unpredictable, but verifiable numbers, without resorting to outside events.)

[-ck]

... I'd love to know what's going on? Some serious mining power playing around?

The blocks come in within a few seconds for more than a half day now:

https://www.biteasy.com/testnet/blocks

I created a "pool" for mining easily on testnet and a ton of blocks have been solved there recently. 4435 at last count.

http://testnet.ckpool.org/

Here's the associated announce:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=763510.0

[L0rdCha0s]

Hi ck - that was actually us, mining using your 'pool'.

[-ck]

Yes I figured as much. I was just adding information since people mining on testnet is rare and used to be not so easy to set up.

[sed]

I wonder if someone was thinking they would hoard a bunch of testnet coins, I know this has happened in the past and that's why testnet was reset (twice).  I hope it doesn't have to get reset again because the more often that testnet gets reset, the less complexity and length it has and less of a good model for mainnet it is.