Coder Proposes Alternative to Bitcoin's 'Notoriously Unreliable' Testnet

Introduced Wednesday, a new proposal called Signet offers a fresh alternative to bitcoin's test network.

Further, protocol developers can use it to test the viability and safety of big changes to bitcoin, such as Segregated Witness, one of the best-known and largest-scale bitcoin changes.

In a new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal posted to the bitcoin developer email list, Bitcoin Core contributor Karl-Johan Alm goes as far as to call it "Notoriously unreliable."

He hopes to change that with a new type of testnet for bitcoin that gets around the old testnet's problems.

Many of the problems with the testnet have to do with mining blocks, which is more erratic on the testnet than on the real bitcoin network.

A few of the problems, Alm argues in the BIP, are: "Huge block reorgs, long gaps in between blocks being mined or sudden bursts of blocks in rapid succession mean that realistic testing of software, especially involving multiple independent parties running software over an extended period of time, becomes infeasible in practice."

To a degree, this happens naturally in bitcoin because it's a distributed network with nodes scattered all over the world, so it takes a bit of time for the nodes to come to agreement on block and transaction history.

If two blocks are broadcast at about the same time from different parts of the network, one block might seem valid to some of the network, and another block valid to the rest of the network.

"Signet helps prevent these problems because the signer is fixed. Making blocks can be pretty cheap because you don't compete with anyone, and there is no security issue with a low hash rate since nobody else has the private keys. Since the network is highly coordinated, reorgs will basically never occur, except if the network operators want them to," Alm told CoinDesk.

Though there is a test Signet live already, his next goal is to get support for the change merged into Bitcoin Core, so that people can use it like the current testnet.