Author: Gavin Andresen 2012-05-29 14:54:03
Published on: 2012-05-29T14:54:03+00:00
A new testnet called "Mark III" has been released as part of the 0.7 release and is now available on the master GitHub branch. The reason for the reset is to create a more stable test network with blockchain rule changes such as BIP16 and BIP30, and testnet difficulty changes. The old testnet was found to be messy due to old clients serving up different, incompatible chains but it uncovered some large-block-chain-reorganization bugs. The minimum difficulty for the new testnet is now 1.0, the same as the main net. There is also a max-difficulty-protection rule that allows blocks to be mined at minimum difficulty under certain conditions. To make it easier to run both old and new code, the wallet and blockchain are stored in $DATADIR/testnet3 instead of $DATADIR/testnet. Additionally, the IRC channel for bootstrapping is now #bitcoinTEST3 instead of #bitcoinTEST. The Mark III testnet comes with a new blockchain that contains interesting test cases for BIP16, enabled Script opcodes, and block acceptance rules. Re-implementing Bitcoin and accepting the Mark III testnet blockchain is a good first test for compatibility. However, additional work is still required to ensure rejection of the same set of invalid transactions or blocks as the original Bitcoin code.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:49:58.438668+00:00