I don't know whether any of you run testnet full node, but i just found out my testnet full node has total size 71GB.
$ du -d 2 -h
594M ./indexes/blockfilter
361M ./indexes/coinstats
6.0G ./indexes/txindex
6.9G ./indexes
450M ./blocks/index
56G ./blocks
7.8G ./chainstate
71G .
I'm also surprised chainstate folder has size 7.8GB. So i decide to run
gettxoutsetinfo and got following statistic which state there are currently 116.8 million UTXO.
{
"height": 2810692,
"bestblock": "000000000000009910d22b6f04ef25d718350863560ea24a85da54e666127e4f",
"txouts": 116842453,
"bogosize": 9425932147,
"hash_serialized_3": "ba355559e0d1c5de59ec7e512a7ef374e0df01be653d60424db397cd84dae801",
"total_amount": 20997039.32915585,
"transactions": 64934575,
"disk_size": 8364679205
}
it's not easy to obtain testnet3 coins these days.
There has always been faucets giving coins and the only complains I've seen so far have been from people who want large amounts and the worst part is that I have not seen any reasonable arguments for needing such amounts as opposed to using something like regtest.
So I wouldn't say "it is not easy to obtain testnet coins".
You're right, but mining tBTC become more challenging. Not only due to lower reward, but also due to higher hashrate/difficulty[1]. And i notice there are less tBTC faucet these days. At least, it's not as easy as few years ago.
[1]
https://mempool.space/testnet/graphs/mining/hashrate-difficulty#all