Casa, a US-based Bitcoin management company, operates a separate, parallel version of the Bitcoin blockchain called the TBTC testnet. The technology supports the tBTC token, which has no financial value but is useful for conducting tests on new protocols that could be supported on the Bitcoin blockchain. In fact, the full form of TBTC is ‘Testnet Bitcoin’. Casa co-founder and blockchain developer Jameson Lopp said in a recent blog post that the TBTC testnet is in urgent need of configuration improvements.
The TBTC testnet helps developers understand how potentially available blockchain solutions work. This TestNest is used for testing and development of these solutions. On testnet Bitcoin, transaction speeds are much faster than on the original mainnet. By comparison, the Bitcoin mainnet reportedly produces an average of 144 blocks per day, while TBTC can produce over 10,000 blocks per day.
Due to the block processing speed, the testnet has already recorded a block height of 2,811,000. It is said that the blockchain will have to wait until 2061 for Bitcoin’s mainnet to reach this block height. This development has caused the reward tokens earned by testnet miners to drop to almost zero, making the testnet nearly unusable for developers. As a result, since miners are not adding new blocks, the number of tBTC tokens available by default on the testnet and exchangeable for BTC is extremely low. Currently the block reward for these testnet miners is only ~0.006TBTC.
“Testnet coins should be abundant and free for developers to experiment and test Bitcoin software without having to spend money or risk real-world value when debugging the software,” said Casa CEO Lopp. More specifically, it is time to reset Bitcoin’s test network, also known as ‘testnet’ or ‘testnet3’.”
The TBTC testnet has not been reorganized in 13 years.
“People have been using testnets for airdrops and other activities that promise real value. This created economic demand for TBTC. People are buying and selling TBTC on several sites. Testnet has some strange quirks that we need to fix, as they are somewhat responsible for us getting to this point,” Lopp noted in his blog post.
It is currently unclear when this blockchain overhaul will begin at TBTC and what the consequences will be for developers designing Bitcoin-compatible protocols using it.
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