Buying or Mining testnet coins, is that possible?

[matthis]

I'm looking for a large amount of testnet coins. 10,000 would be nice, maybe more (but definitely more than a thousand). Is there a place where I can buy some?

Otherwise, I also have some mining hardware with 50GH/s hashing power, is there a way to solo mine testnet coins with ASICs? Or is there maybe a testnet pool?

Thanks!

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[frankenmint]

I'm looking for a large amount of testnet coins. 10,000 would be nice, maybe more (but definitely more than a thousand). Is there a place where I can buy some?

Otherwise, I also have some mining hardware with 50GH/s hashing power, is there a way to solo mine testnet coins with ASICs? Or is there maybe a testnet pool?

Thanks!

I believe you could set the core client to run in testnet mode and run a command in the built in console to "setgenerate=true" iirc.  This would allow you to mine on the testnet effectively.  If you had an asic, run bitcoin core as a server using the -d flag when running it (use dos and type that after bitcoin.exe) and point your asic to the host machine running the core client.

[-ck]

It's actually hard to generate testnet coins even without mining them now since setgenerate is only a cpu miner,  but diff is only something like 56 thousand so a few GH can do it for you. I have a testnet pool that makes it easy to solo mine them http://testnet.ckpool.org/
There's a pool thread for the solo and testnet pools: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=763510.0

[matthis]

So that means it's going to be very difficult for me to get several thousand of testnet coins just by mining...
So there really is no place where we can buy testnet coins? I found some faucet, but nothing interesting there.
This website was suppose to sell some http://testnetcoins.com/ but it looks like it's not live anymore.

[-ck]

So that means it's going to be very difficult for me to get several thousand of testnet coins just by mining...
So there really is no place where we can buy testnet coins? I found some faucet, but nothing interesting there.
This website was suppose to sell some http://testnetcoins.com/ but it looks like it's not live anymore.

Hardly anyone uses the testnet network any more that's why. I have almost 1000 of them, I can send them to you if you want just give me an address. Feel free to give me whatever in return, as they're intrinsically supposed to have no value. Alternatively if you set up a private testnet network you can do rack up thousands in very little time.

[TheRealSteve]

So there really is no place where we can buy testnet coins?

Call me crazy, but... why? Why would you want to buy testnet coins?

In the off-chance that you need to do some testing of some custom software: you wouldn't even really need the official testnet; as ckolivas points out, just launch a private one.  If bored, adjust the code, give yourself a few million coins from the get-go.

[matthis]

I have almost 1000 of them, I can send them to you if you want just give me an address.

Yes! That would be awesome Here's a testnet address mfig3SvGfJR5Q3duTvYrvBy5LtduowpYTH
I can send you back some dogecoin if you want 

[-ck]

I have almost 1000 of them, I can send them to you if you want just give me an address.

Yes! That would be awesome Here's a testnet address mfig3SvGfJR5Q3duTvYrvBy5LtduowpYTH
I can send you back some dogecoin if you want 

Now you've offended me by offering me something even more worthless in return...

I'll fire up the testnet client later and send them off.

[cloverme]

Doesn't the testnet blockchain reset every so often so that all the testnet coins become invalid? I thought I read that somewhere, but maybe I got it wrong.

[matthis]

Wow, awesome. Thanks!

Someone should definitely create a market place where one can buy/sell some testnet coins using bitcoins.

Even though they are worthless and the genesis block can be changed at anytime, it's still extremely useful to do live testing without using real money with almost no change in the code

And as soon as you want more than a couple, it's really difficult to get...

[deepceleron]

I can do up to ~5000 if you are looking to send them back after "testing". You really don't need that much - Bitcoin works the same whether you send 10 or 1000. You are requesting $3.9M equivalent and there are few cases to test with that much. I'd want most returned - why? Mining testnet currently takes real mhash since the difficulty is stupidly high on testnet:

518958.15625 testnet difficulty / 34,661,425,923.98 mainnet difficulty = 0.0000149722 ratio

5000 TestBTC * 518958.15625 testnet difficulty / 34,661,425,923.98 mainnet difficulty = 0.07486105 real BTC mined per 5000 testnet mined

Then factor in the time to do 2228942320 MHashes on your hardware to mine the 200 blocks. The difficulty of 518958.15 translates to a 3,715 ghash/s testnet hashrate. With your 50GH miner, you would be 1.32% of the testnet hashrate, therefore it would take about 15000 blocks for you to mine 5000 testnet coins (the last 15000 took 11.5 weeks).

Paying or trading for testnet coins is highly discouraged. It would just make noobs think they have value and try to drain the faucet and testnet would be reset just to show they have no value.

[Bitcoin++]

It makes sense to mine testnet coins with an old ASIC that's no longer profitable for BTC-mining.
For a tiny amount of electricity you receive a relatively large share of testcoins.

Hook up to testnet here : http://testnet.ckpool.org/

[kokojie]

So there really is no place where we can buy testnet coins?

Call me crazy, but... why? Why would you want to buy testnet coins?

In the off-chance that you need to do some testing of some custom software: you wouldn't even really need the official testnet; as ckolivas points out, just launch a private one.  If bored, adjust the code, give yourself a few million coins from the get-go.

Except your private testnet has no real users, and the official testnet has actual users, nodes, miners and transactions that are not controlled by you.

[Bitcoin++]

I mined some Testnet coins just for fun.
I offer to sell at a very low, symbolic price of 0.0001 BTC per Testnet coin.

[-ck]

I mined some Testnet coins just for fun.
I offer to sell at a very low, symbolic price of 0.0001 BTC per Testnet coin.

I gave out 1000 testnet coins for nothing. You want 0.1BTC for that amount. That's not symbolic...  120,000 testnet coins have been minted in under a week on my free testnet pool with hardware that would mine 0.1BTC over about 6 months mining real bitcoin... Symbolic would be 1 satoshi per testnet bitcoin.