Author: Adam Ritter 2013-04-07 13:50:01
Published on: 2013-04-07T13:50:01+00:00
In a mailing list conversation about Bitcoin development, Adam Ritter expressed the importance of integration testing for Bitcoin's future, citing the need to make code more stable and test attack scenarios, refactoring, and extending code. He suggested tests that can simulate multiple Bitcoin users and verify that the network of clients are working together towards Bitcoin's goals. Gregory Maxwell preferred calling these tests "system tests" and recommended using blocktester, a system based on BitcoinJ that simulates a peer against a slightly instrumented copy of Bitcoin (d/-qt). Blocktester simulates many complicated network scenarios and tests the boundaries of many of the particular rules of the blockchain validation protocol. These tests are run as part of the automated tests on every proposed patch to the reference software. In addition to this, there is a public secondary test Bitcoin network called 'testnet', which operates the same as the production network except it allows mining low difficulty blocks to prevent it from going for long times without blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T14:37:43.779009+00:00