Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-22 18:46:18
Published on: 2014-04-22T18:46:18+00:00
In an email conversation between Tamas Blummer and another individual, Blummer questions the importance of testnet in Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). He sees testnet as a tool for a certain type of testing that was likely created due to Satoshi not writing unit tests. However, the other individual argues that testnet exists for public testing involving multiple people and services, creating a public live fire environment where grey hats can try out their attacks while minimizing damage. Testnet is not an alternative to the unit and integration tests that exist in Bitcoin core but exists for more or less completely different reasons. The other individual also clarifies that testnet is not normally addressed in BIPs at all, except for soft fork bips that had compressed deployment schedules on testnet. For address like specification, a version byte is used and there is a common encoding for version bytes that flags the network ID in the byte.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:26:31.449259+00:00