After the success of the first Bitcoin BCH stress test on the first of September, the group behind that test have decided to ramp up their efforts to showcase the robustness and reliability of the of the BCH Network.
The group plans a more extensive, more professional stress test on November 17, two days after the scheduled protocol upgrade.
Rather than I tell you about the upcoming stress test, Brenden Lee of https://stresstestbitcoin.cash has put some words on the page to give some insight into their group, their processes and what everyone can expect come November 17.
The Professional Stress Test
"Our team came together to bring the first stress test to life, and while the test itself was something of a success, the 2.2 million transactions were a far cry from the target we had set for ourselves of 5 million transactions.
The reasons were wide-ranging and included a lack of automated systems for re-starting tests that failed, issues with the way some nodes were managing transaction buffers, and a lack of people to run the testing and manage the system.
After the test, a small group of us came together to look at forming a professional testing group, and the idea of the professional stress test was born.
Dale Dickins is an early Bitcoin activist and the maker of a documentary called "The Bitcoin Doco." She works tirelessly to build networks of people who use Bitcoin, creating small social worlds to achieve great things. She has recently been part of the group who brought the Bitcoin Cash Jeepney to the streets of Manila and is working on forming long-term business relationships in Bitcoin.
Esthon Medeiros is the wizard behind the curtain, building and managing the test machinery, currently being referred to as the 'Satoshi Shotgun,' which has significantly evolved since the first test. We now can create many geographically dispersed nodes using multiple Bitcoin clients (we currently support Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC) and can easily regather funds and send large numbers of transactions for a sustained period. The machine's power will be on display during the upcoming pre-test which we hope will achieve at least one 32MB block.
Brendan Lee is the author of BUIP086 which extends the functionality of Bitcoin QR codes and developed and now sells the patented Safewords system through his company Coin storage Guru, while more recently has been fortunate enough to be part of the team at Tokenized, recently awarded the Coingeek Token prize. His role has been planning the strategy for ensuring money and resources are available on the day as well as acting as a technical interface for customers.
John Goldberg is the creator of the innovative Pixel Wallet (an Android BCH wallet that uses pictures to send cash) and was a significant contributor to the original stress test and one of the core members of the BCH Jeepney team, who were the first to implement Handcash's POP Retail system in a real-world application.
We also have Spark who created some fantastic data visualizations for the first stress test and is working on ways to capture the essence of what happens during this stress test.
And finally, Yobits who was the originator of the Stress Test idea and as webpage master has done a great job putting together a beautiful website.
As for the stress test itself, we want it known that we are not here to break things. We, as a team, are aligned with Satoshi Vision, however, have decided to run the test in such a way that a network supporting current rules, or the ABC ruleset would face minimal disruption.
The test will challenge mempools, and users may have to pay slightly higher fees than usual (test transactions will carry a fee of just 1sat/byte, so transactions with two satoshis/byte should usually be mined in the next block regardless of the state of the mempool) for reliable transaction confirmations. However, we believe that if a network wants to call itself Bitcoin, it must be able to show the world that it is anti-fragile, and this includes withstanding attacks that I would consider relatively cheap (we will spend about 70BCH over the course of the day) for a well-funded state based actor to execute.
We are very strong proponents of scaling Bitcoin and believe that a successful demonstration of a public network processing over a million transactions per hour will send a huge signal to businesses and the broader public that Bitcoin Cash is serious about adoption, and serious about becoming a global cash network. We hope that we can generate enough hype through this test that companies looking at implementing cryptocurrency-based payments will put Bitcoin Cash first, as it forges a path towards being the best money possible.
Following the stress test, the team is working on a business plan to create value-added services around generating large volumes of transactions on the blockchain for things such as advertising, corporate testing, stress testing and more. The team is very much looking forward to announcing these efforts soon. – Brendan Lee
