Namecoin Forum

During tonights Bitcoin meetup I talked with some developers whom relayed how frustrating it was not to have an active faucet. Domob has detailed his struggles with the test-net in the past and (as I see it) there were 3 general issues:

• No faucet.
• Dangerously few nodes.
• High difficulty rating.

I've setup a couple of tickets on the namecoin.info rep, one for the faucet and one for the test-net proper. Please feel free to add/edit the tickets.

I also setup a Bounty Source bounty for the faucet website. Jeremy_Rand and I (and I think everyone else?) have talked about using it to crowd-source funding. BountySource told me that they will start accepting Bitcoins in < three months and I wanted to experiment with it. So I seeded it with a $15 pledge and set a rather arbitrary goal of $300.

It's unlikely that they will ever accept Namecoins but we can always add that into the text of the ticket.

They also offer some tools to integrate the tickets with info from the bounty. Would anyone mind if I tried it? Also, what should I put in the title for the source? Should we have some special formatting for bounties with goals?

I think that the hardest problem with the test-net so far is the high difficulty. Sometimes it seems to be mined nevertheless (anyone knows by whom?), but of course you can't test anything if it is stuck when you want to test. I mined a bit with some USB ASICs I have in the past, but I only have about 1.5 GH/s which is not much compared to the current difficulty of 18k.

The faucet is a very nice idea, and as mentioned already in another thread, I can possibly work on it in a few weeks when I find time and no-one else wants to do it until then; but I encourage anyone to take this on if someone is interested! I have enough other ideas to work on for my time. I have some test-net coins from my ASIC mining, and if someone needs them for a useful project, just contact me and I can send some until we have a faucet.

domob wrote: I have some test-net coins from my ASIC mining, and if someone needs them for a useful project, just contact me and I can send some until we have a faucet.

Could you post a something on the development on the forum and ask Phelix to sticky it?

Also, could we just reset the difficulty manually now or have a patchset waiting for the next hardfork?

indolering wrote:

domob wrote: I have some test-net coins from my ASIC mining, and if someone needs them for a useful project, just contact me and I can send some until we have a faucet.

Could you post a something on the development on the forum and ask Phelix to sticky it?

Also, could we just reset the difficulty manually now or have a patchset waiting for the next hardfork?

I don't think we can reset it manually, except if we release a new genesis block (but then we also need to patch all nodes). However, we could add the difficulty-adjustment code from Bitcoin, and only do a hardfork on test-net. I don't think this would be a problem if we can coordinate those involved currently. And even if only two nodes run the new code, this could be used as a test-net for whoever wants to develop code. So maybe this wouldn't even be too hard.

domob wrote: However, we could add the difficulty-adjustment code from Bitcoin, and only do a hardfork on test-net. I don't think this would be a problem if we can coordinate those involved currently.

How difficult would it be to port that over? Does libcoin already have it?

domob wrote: And even if only two nodes run the new code, this could be used as a test-net for whoever wants to develop code. So maybe this wouldn't even be too hard.

Someone must have a misconfigured client. Don't we control the IRC channels? We could just blacklist all of the misbehaving clients on there.

Bitcoin commit for difficulty adjustment is c52296a73e5222628bf6a03eaf727622594bf464 (most of the work, but not too much).

We need a new genesis block (ex on commit 98ba262a48b66cae8478525e809898512e997948).

And to avoid getting the old chain, we can change the chain ID too (ex on commit a9d811a9760720d29eb1be3b738e59a1621cc6d6), but it is optional.

We should not worry about a hardfork on testnet.
Announce it, and people will upgrade if they want/need.

khal wrote:Bitcoin commit for difficulty adjustment is c52296a73e5222628bf6a03eaf727622594bf464 (most of the work, but not too much).

We need a new genesis block (ex on commit 98ba262a48b66cae8478525e809898512e997948).

And to avoid getting the old chain, we can change the chain ID too (ex on commit a9d811a9760720d29eb1be3b738e59a1621cc6d6), but it is optional.

We should not worry about a hardfork on testnet.
Announce it, and people will upgrade if they want/need.

Made a new ticket on the Namecoin repo.

Thanks indolering.
I didn't know we could use checkboxes, interesting feature :p

khal wrote:Thanks indolering.
I didn't know we could use checkboxes, interesting feature :p

I stumbled over it when looking for formatting help. It's to prevent "micro" issue tickets and fragmentation.