Quote
I'll never understand the argument "People can just faucet 0.0001 TBTC because that is all that is needed for testing!" but then "We need people to be able to mine a 50 TBTC block with a Windows 98!!!!"
True. After 20 minutes, CPU miners should also get a smaller block reward than usual. If the difficulty drops from 1,000,000 into 1, then the total block reward (with fees) should also drop for example from 50,0100,0000 satoshis into just 5,001 satoshis. And the rest of the block reward can be timelocked into some future block number (so that ASIC miners will get it), or simply burned (which is easier to implement).This is an interesting concept.
Testnet people need a pool that pays for shares found. A CPU will still be able to submit valid shares easily and quickly receive a small amount of Bitcoin Testnet.
Math time (and correct me if I made a mistake): let's assume difficulty 100M, and let's assume a CPU is fast enough to solve a block at difficulty 1 in 1 minute. That means the CPU will earn 50*6*24/60/100M = 0.0000012 coins per day. That's not enough to test anything, as long as there are ASIC miners active.0.0000012*100 days= 0.00012, which is enough to test according to people who have thousands of testnet coins. Better start mining the day you start developing if that is the route you want to go with a Windows 98 machine!
The fact that someone can use a normal CPU and generate enough of anything to test in 100 days is pretty damn good for a global testing network...