Author: Dennison Bertram 2013-06-15 13:26:01
Published on: 2013-06-15T13:26:01+00:00
The use of testnet as an alt-coin has its advantages, allowing developers to test non-standard transactions in a pseudo live environment where people are incentivized to try and steal and come up with clever ways of gaming the system. This knowledge would be invaluable if non-standard transactions are ever going to become a reality on main net. Additionally, it allows developers to develop new technologies and services that currently won't run on Bitcoin main net but might be enabled in the future, at which point they can switch over to main net. Without any development happening with non-standard transactions, there might be a strong argument to never bother enabling them, as the risk of doing so might not justify the benefits. The time in the future when non-standard transactions might be enabled might be so far in the future when Bitcoin has hit mass adoption, and changing anything might require far more political negotiations between users and devs than currently. Thus, much more proof of functionality and value as well as testing might be required. Therefore, allowing testnet to act as an alt-coin helps to overcome the inertia of the status quo and develop something cool that main net users might desire enough to overcome the full potential of Satoshi's idea. An interesting idea was proposed by Adam Back regarding the experimentation of new features without imposing a big testing burden on Bitcoin main. He suggested using an alt-coin, bitcoin-staging, where the coins are the same as on Bitcoin, the mining power goes to Bitcoin main, some aspect of merged mining, but no native mining, and the ability to use Bitcoins by locking them on Bitcoin to move them to bitcoin-staging and vice versa. Dennison replied by suggesting Ripple could be used to set up a transfer system between the 'main' and 'staging' systems.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T17:13:09.765427+00:00