On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 11:21 PM Johnson Lau via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > A public testnet is still useful so in articles people could make references > to these transactions. > Maybe we could have 2 testnets at the same time, with one having a smaller > block size?
I would much rather have a signed blocks testnet, with a predictable structured reorg pattern* (and a config flag so you can make your node ignore all blocks that are going to get reorged out in a reorg of nth or larger). There are many applications where the mined testnet just doesn't give you anything useful... it's too stable when you want it to be a bit unstable and too wildly unstable when you want a bit of stability-- e.g. there are very few test cases where a 20,000 block reorg does anything useful for you; yet they happen on testnet. We looked at doing this previously in Bitcoin core and jtimon had some patches, but the existing approach increased the size of the blockindex objects in memory while not in signed testnet mode. This could probably have been fixed by turning one of the fields like the merkel root into a union of it's normal value and a pointer a look-aside block index that is used only in signed block testnet mode. Obviously such a mode wouldn't be a replacement for an ordinary testnet, but it would be a useful middle ground between regtest (that never sees anything remotely surprising and can't easily be used for collaborative testing) and full on testnet where your attempts to test against ordinary noise require you cope your entirely universe being removed from existence and replaced by something almost but not quite entirely different at the whim of some cthulhuian blind idiot god. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
