Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Bitcoin Testnet is the first ever altcoin & only alt Satoshi is 100% linked to.
by
gmaxwell
on 29/05/2025, 22:44:30 UTC
⭐ Merited by BayAreaCoins (1)
You might be surprised to learn that I went and promoted your services to several early testnet miners.  Your service looks like a flashback to the glory days of the earliest bitcoin exchanges, which I think were much nicer in practice than the stuff people use today which looks pretty but is full of anti-features.

Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot, so to say--  I don't have and I doubt any current developer has any issue with you trading testnet coins generally only that trade in the current testnet screws up some people's ability to use it for testing. Now than TN3 is no longer the default in Bitcoin trade isn't a problem (well it is for some still using it, of course).   Unlike the bulk of the twitter bitcoin maxies most bitcoin developers don't have some blood hate of altcoins, mostly they just consider them irrelevant (and or a source of amusement / moral lessons) or a minor irritation (e.g. when people promoting them make a nuisance of themselves).  I'm very very happy that people have the freedom to create and use altcoins, because that is the same freedom that allows bitcoin to exist and which backstops bitcoin against corruption (e.g. if somehow a hostile force takes over all bitcoin mining or whatever, people will migrate onto an alternative -- which undermines the incentive to try the attack in the first place).

When it comes to testnet developers want a valueless alternative to bitcoin for testing so that doing arbitrary nonsense doesn't have accounting/legal/tax/etc. implications or friction from having to buy stuff, or churn from people hovering up all the coins they can to sell them for a few cents -- and they're just gonna continue to do whatever it takes to get to that for their own use (which is more possible than you might realize because for this purpose there isn't so much a hard requirement for the result to be open/inclusive/etc.) of course no one else is obligated to use their test thing.

Maybe there is a place in the market for another altcoin which is just "bitcoin but not bitcoin".  I'm kinda dubious in that there are just so many obvious improvements that haven't been done in Bitcoin due to the tremendous conservatism that goes along with being widely used and valuable.  But if so, I don't think testnet (of any version) is the best way to get there.  Particularly because Bitcoin Core has been designed in a way that makes it extremely easy to make a fork that just changes the chain parameters.


As a total aside, I have a totally offtopic forum question for you:  How do get notified about responses in old threads.  There were good odds that I'd never noticed your reply here since I don't normally read the altcoin subforum.  I only find replies like this by manually checking threads I was recently active in, but clearly there must be some SMF feature I've never noticed. Tongue