In principle I'm asking, what makes ether on the testnet worthless and ether on the production net valuable. On both nets, contracts and transactions are included in blocks which are mined, so electricity is spent on both.
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1Possible duplicate of What prevents the market from assigning value to testnet ETH?– Roland KoflerCommented Jun 19, 2016 at 13:06
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you find the answers in the upper Q– Roland KoflerCommented Jun 19, 2016 at 13:07
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3 Answers
Technically they are equal, they only have different parameters and in particular different genesis block and different networkId. Two Ξthereum nodes can connect each others only when they are using the same genesis block and the same networkId. That's it.
When you are talking about testnet you are usually referring to Morden, an specific Ξthereum blockchain that the community agreed to use for test purpose. With this agreement in place, all Ξthereum clients use a specific genesis block and networkId = 2 when you start the testnet. The genesis block was set with a very low difficulty so everyone can essentially try mining blocks or, in any case, he can call a faucet to get ETHs.
Using Morden is sometimes more useful then private net to test smart contracts, transactions and mining because over there you can find other other real developers with real nodes (i.e. other real and different clients, real latency, and so on)
In early stage of development, I suggest to use a private net instead of Morden. Again, it is technically identical to Morden and Frontier (the main net with networkId = 1) but there you are the God and you can test everything without worrying about involving other real peers around the world.
Last note: why ETHs used over the testnet have no values? The only reason is because the community does not assign value to them. In every cryptocurrency the value comes from how much value people assign to that digital asset. And usually people does not assign value to something that is abundant and there for all to be grabbed. ΞTH over Morden are easy and free money, so they can't be valuable at all, at least until you find someone that agree with you to assign value to them.
answered Jun 19, 2016 at 14:51
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Thanks for the answer. Of course the question implies, why does the community not assign value to the ether tokens from testnet..– TMOTTMCommented Jun 19, 2016 at 19:06
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Upgraded the response. ΞTH over Morden have no value essentially because they are free and easily grabbable from everyone. Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 14:13
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Man, I'm searching for development best practices too @GiuseppeBertone. Can you tell me how Oracelize.it does it? Do you have a blog post regarding this? Are you using (probably not!) Truffle, Embark, ethercamp cloud9. What tools, how is your development cycle? Maybe a blog post...? Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 17:54
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What's with the Ξ character? Haven't seen Ethereum branded this way before. Commented Jul 22, 2017 at 20:32
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- Difficulty is much lower on the testnet
- Private testnets can be reset at any time
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You cannot reset Morden, the usual testnet used as default by all Ξthereum clients. You can reset private net instead. Commented Jun 19, 2016 at 14:53
Private testnet proved much helpful in those cases when there was no option in proving over the tests and there the difficulty proved best.
