The Bitcoin SV Scaling Test Network (STN) is an initiative of the Bitcoin SV Node project, owned by Bitcoin Association and operated by nChain (with funding by CoinGeek) to scale and test Bitcoin beyond gigabyte and eventually to terabyte blocks. In February 2019, the Bitcoin SV team publicly released client software with full support for the STN making it available to all. We have since been working on building robust ancillary services on the STN to make it easier to work as well as a more accurate representation of the mainnet. The network has since been used extensively by the BSV Node team to conduct research as well as to test the limits of the Bitcoin SV Node software under various conditions. Now that we have built a solid base, it is time to cast the net wider.
We invite and actively encourage Bitcoin developers and business alike to join the STN, to run their apps and services alongside their production environments. Working closely with Esthon Medeiros and the Satoshi Shotgun team, the STN has a continuous and varying supply of transaction traffic and your service will be continuously battle tested with a constant cycle of load profile conditions. In addition to the benefits of learning the performance bottlenecks of your app or service early and being able to rectify them before those loads are reached in production, the presence of your service on the STN can be used to give your clients assurance that it is keeping up with the scaling requirements. To that effect, we plan later this year to create an STN Certification program that will enable a service to claim independent certification of its resilience to specific network load profiles.
We are building out further support infrastructure for the STN, the beginnings of this were launched with bitcoinscaling.io. This includes a dedicated support team behind the STN, who will be eager to assist with any questions from the builders and innovators in the space, breaking new ground on what is known about what Bitcoin can do.
In order to the ensure STN is adequately resourced, the Bitcoin SV Node team has appointed Brad Kristensen (a.k.a @brad1121) to the role of STN Operations Manager. Brad’s role will be to further develop the support infrastructure behind the STN and to ensure smooth running of the network. He will also be tasked with providing support channels for businesses and developers that need assistance with getting an instance of their application running on the STN. Brad has a long history with Bitcoin including mining as far back as the GPU era as well as being a senior developer with nChain who works very closely with the Bitcoin SV node team. He is a natural fit as a liaison between STN users and the Bitcoin SV dev team.
In the coming months, we plan to increase the maximum block size of the STN to 10GB. We are moving past the era of filling up blocks and stepping into the realm of boundless growth. Our goal is not to push the limits, but to prove there are no limits.
To get involved, head to https://bitcoinscaling.io/ or get in touch via [email protected] to join the STN and work on the cutting edge of Bitcoin’s unbounded future.
Steve Shadders
