Quote from: MaxSoocha on Today at 05:28:16 AM

Quote from: NotFuzzyWarm on March 22, 2024, 03:23:40 PM

There is no reason for tBTC to have any value at all. It's available for FREE from faucets. Yes they usually have a low & slow payout but so what? Ones does not need whole coins to test with. Just as with BTC, small fractions of a tBTC are processed and work the same as whole coins.

It's not SUPPOSED to have value, that is true, but it's still a functioning PoW chain which means you need electricity, hardware and money to mine. If it had NO value then faucets would give away 100 coins for free, but they don't because it costs money to mine, and it's not easy to obtain large amounts when you need a modern ASIC to mine testnet.

I ran a BTC faucet from 2014-15, giving away free bitcoin in exchange for ad revenue. That didn't mean bitcoin had no value and that's the same trade testnet faucets are making today.

The low payout of faucets is a problem. Saying you don't need larger amounts for testing is a myth repeated by many. Bitcointalk runs on PHP and MySQL and a large portion of the web still does. MySQL's max integer limit is 2,147,483,647, and it's best practice to store bitcoin amounts in satoshis, not floats. Therefore you need at least 21.48 tBTC to test your database and all aspects of your site and/or connected apps can handle integers larger than 32 bits. Is a deposit larger than 21.47 BTC likely? Probably not on most sites, but it's not impossible, and that's the last order you want to screw up when you switch your site to mainnet because you didn't test your site properly.

Devs aren't the only ones needing larger amounts, so do bitcoin companies. When exchanges and bitcoin companies do technical tests for their new hires, they use tBTC and they don't use 0.0012 faucet amounts, they use full coins. I can speak from personal experience.

Instead of shaming people with false narratives some devs like Jameson Lopp understand the need for larger amounts and will gift larger sums to other devs, but he doesn't have an endless amount to give away. Not everyone is generous as Jameson and larger sums are now being loaned and/or sold by others so users can get the amount they want/need.

That's a great point and I'm trying to figure out some other use cases for tBTC.