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Testnet

Getting Started with Bitcoin testnet

This guide will help you in setting up a BitcoinSV node which connects to the testnet.

What is testnet?

Testnet is a public test network used for general testing. It is typically used to test software before it is released onto mainnet. As testnet is public and unmanaged, software on testnet may not be 100% stable. Transactions per second and block difficulty are low.

System requirements for running a Testnet node: System Requirements

QuickStart Instructions

Step 1:

Install SV Node according to the installation guide: SV Node

Step 2:

Configure bitcoind to connect to the testnet and not Mainnet, as well as setting mandatory parameters. Make the following changes to your bitcoin.conf

testnet=1
maxstackmemoryusageconsensus=2000000000
excessiveblocksize=10000000000
minminingtxfee=0.00000001

Step 3:

If you wish to add any other custom configurations to your Bitcoin SV node you can appended them to the bitcoin.conf file with the editor of your choice.

Step 4:

Start the bitcoind process. If you have been following the installation guide you can use systemd

sudo systemctl start bitcoind.service

If this is the first time you have started the node, it may take several hours or even days as the node downloads blocks and checks that they have not been tampered with. In this case, it may make sense to run the node in foreground to see status messages.

If this is not the first time you have run the node, it should start up quickly and it may make sense to run the node in the background.

Step 5:

Check the status of the node and the bitcoind process. Type the following at the command line:

[bitcoin-sv installation directory]/bin/bitcoin-cli getinfo

This should generate an output similar to

{
  "version": 101001600,
  "protocolversion": 70016,
  "walletversion": 160300,
  "balance": 0.00000000,
  "initcomplete": true,
  "blocks": 1595779,
  "timeoffset": 0,
  "connections": 12,
  "proxy": "",
  "difficulty": 1,
  "testnet": true,
  "stn": false,
  "keypoololdest": 1705486144,
  "keypoolsize": 2000,
  "paytxfee": 0.00000000,
  "relayfee": 0.00000000,
  "errors": "",
  "maxblocksize": 10000000000,
  "maxminedblocksize": 4000000000,
  "maxstackmemoryusagepolicy": 100000000,
  "maxstackmemoryusageconsensus": 100000000
}

Funding

If you wish to use testnet for testing, you will need to obtain unspent coins. A number of faucets are available:

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