This is very suspicious to me
Unfortunately, it's nothing new:
There is a shitty/scammy ethereum ICO thing right now giving people shares in exchange for testnet btc, this is totally screwing up the usability of testnet and also causing antisocial dickwads to waste all our time begging for testnet coins without disclosing that the only thing they want them for is to make a quick buck.
That was 3.5 years ago.
It is related to the
SatoshiVM airdrop, which uses testnet coins to get SatoshiVM Testnet tokens
It never ceases to amaze me how creative they are in creating money-grabbing schemes. I've been wondering what would be the next thing, and after altcoins, ICOs, tokens, Forkcoins, DeFi, NFTs and Ordinals, it seems that this is "the next big thing". Lol.
Decentralized Bitcoin ZK Rollup Layer2 that is compatible with the EVM ecosystem and uses native BTC as gas.
SatoshiVM introduces the EVM ecosystem to BTC, granting the Bitcoin ecosystem the capability to issue assets and build applications.
All I see is meaningless buzzwords and abbreviations. The website design reminds me of the ICO time: all flashy websites, all more or less the same, all filled with BS about disrupting whatever industry, and all completely forgotten a few years later. This looks the same: a quick money grabbing scheme for the creator, and a lot of gullible people will lose their money over this.
Compare
lightning.network: an informative website, no flashy design, no animations, no buzzwords. It makes me wonder why the money grabbing scams have so much better PR than real projects.
Bitcoin Core devs need to take action and reset the testnet network again.
It's been a while:
The current testnet is on its third iteration, somewhat unimaginatively titled testnet3.
It was put that way by this commit:
Testnet, Mark III
gavinandresen authored 2012-04-12
~
Essentially, the devs want testnet coins to be worthless for two reasons:
to make them easy to mine
because it's nice to have a place to demonstrate attacks against bitcoin without actually disrupting the network. You can show that an attack is valid without costing people real money.
I wasn't around when the first 2 Testnets ended, but considering it's been almost 12 years, this has been the longest running Testnet ever. And
it's not easy to mine without specialized hardware.