A while ago, I got all excited around the idea of Bitcoin as art . It was such a satisfying perspective that I decided to embrace it and implement a tipping service on the Bitcoin Testnet for this website. A fun experiment, a way to learn something and tinker around with the technology. The best part was: it somehow didn’t require any maintenance. It would work without further tinkering.

Sure, from time to time I would need to reboot my server and I had to spend the extra effort to restart the Bitcoin Testnet node, lightning node and wallet and test again that everything still worked and it did.

The network itself however didn’t keep up with such stability and started facing some issues. The test network of the time testnet3 not having a strict difficulty adjustment suffers under vandalism1. Storms of new blocks flood the chain, which my server manages well enough, and with node pruning it doesn’t consume much disk space. The service could still run fine and I let it be, yet it was a sign of the upcoming problems.

Why kill it?

The test network is for testing, with coins that have no value and which should be easy to get. That is no longer true. I didn’t really need more coins myself, I had already my channels open. But you do need them to jump into this experiment. My personally recommended website for starting with lightning on the testnet htlc.me doesn’t work anymore. The website is there, it looks like it should work but it doesn’t, all payment and invoices fail. Getting new test coins on chain is not free anymore1, they have now accrued value and a price to get. This seems an inevitable consequence of a Proof of Work network. Since it costs resources to run, it demands a market for fees and market for coins. It seems fair to charge something for using its resources. Yet that makes it harder to get started, as bitcoin developers claim.

The bitcoin developers decided to reset the Test network, give everybody a new testing ground and fix some of the problems with the current test network. I agree with that. The problem is that the new network to my knowledge does not yet offer the same services the previous does. I can run a node on the new testnet4, yet it has not yet embraced lightning. To this day, supporting testnet4 is still a feature request for LND , the lightning implementation I’ve been playing with. The service I used to find lightning nodes 1ml.com has no information about testnet4 at all. mempool.space already provides block exploring services for testnet4, yet it doesn’t do it for lightning. I get the again the feeling that lightning doesn’t yet run on testnet4, and worse that people don’t care about it.

All that leaves me to conclude, that this technology got left behind, that I’m discouraged to work on this technology. It feels like trying to play with a broken toy no one wants to fix. I continue to believe in Bitcoin as art, and that its technology with lightning have potential, yet it wont be part of the future as a technology if its stewards can’t keep it operational, inclusive and user-friendly.

It makes no sense to me to continue operating a test node on the lagging testnet3, and I can’t really migrate to testnet4, because it doesn’t work for lightning yet. It has been months since it launched, and there is still no consideration for it yet. So much for the lies, that crypto moves at neck breaking pace and it is the future of finance.

Whatever the Bitcoin valuation is, it remains completely detached from reality. Well I guess all these traded assets(securities, real state, government debt) are, they exist for speculation. I just happen to have spent more effort understanding Bitcoin and I can’t see reason to think it is the future, when it isn’t accessible for everybody to play with.

But it is an asset, you shouldn’t be playing with it!

I disagree. We have monopoly, to play with money and buying assets. Crypto is an asset and a payment network, and we need to be able to play with it without the risk. That consideration of course doesn’t go well with the crypto people, who want to dump their bags of coins on the rest of the world. Thus they only focus on offering the real thing and you must buy into that.

I believe lightning is a wonderful technology. Today, it is however impossible to play with it, it doesn’t run on testnet4. You can spin it locally on the regtest, yet the whole point of a payment network, is the network, not the chain. There it fails, and makes it for now to operate a lightning node. I wish, that the ecosystem improves at some time in the future and to be able to restart this project.

Or, maybe, I’ll end up fully embracing the nature of a Proof of Work chain and relaunch the service on the mainnet. For that I still need to develop some more confidence to have a service running with real money on the internet. I remain quite risk adverse on that front.

  1. https://blog.lopp.net/griefing-bitcoin-testnet/  ↩︎ ↩︎