4ec30d53ec
The next commit requires an additional mainnet block which changes the difficulty.
Also fix a few minor mistakes in the test (suite):
- rename the create_coinbase retarger_period argument to halving_period. Before bitcoin#31583 this was hardcoded for regtest where these values are the same.
- drop unused fees argument from mine helper
Finally the CPU miner instructions for generating the alternative mainnet chain are expanded.
Github-Pull: #33446
Rebased-From: 4c3c1f42cf
Various test vectors
mainnet_alt.json
For easier testing the difficulty is maximally increased in the first (and only) retarget period, by producing blocks approximately 2 minutes apart.
The alternate mainnet chain was generated as follows:
- use faketime to set node clock to 2 minutes after genesis block
- mine a block using a CPU miner such as https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer
- restart node with a faketime 2 minutes later
for i in {1..2016}
do
t=$(( 1231006505 + $i * 120 ))
faketime "`date -d @$t +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`" \
bitcoind -connect=0 -nocheckpoints -stopatheight=$i
done
The CPU miner is kept running as follows:
./minerd -u ... -p ... -o http://127.0.0.1:8332 --no-stratum \
--coinbase-addr 1NQpH6Nf8QtR2HphLRcvuVqfhXBXsiWn8r \
--algo sha256d --no-longpoll --scantime 3 --retry-pause 1
The payout address is derived from first BIP32 test vector master key:
pkh(xprv9s21ZrQH143K3QTDL4LXw2F7HEK3wJUD2nW2nRk4stbPy6cq3jPPqjiChkVvvNKmPGJxWUtg6LnF5kejMRNNU3TGtRBeJgk33yuGBxrMPHi/44h/0h/0h/<0;1>/*)#fkjtr0yn
It uses pkh() because tr() outputs at low heights are not spendable (unexpected-witness).
This makes each block deterministic except for its timestamp and nonce, which
are stored in mainnet_alt.json and used to reconstruct the chain without
having to redo the proof-of-work.
The timestamp was not kept constant because at difficulty 1 it's not sufficient to only grind the nonce. Grinding the extra_nonce or version field instead would have required additional (stratum) software. It would also make it more complicated to reconstruct the blocks in this test.
The getblocktemplate RPC code needs to be patched to ignore not being connected
to any peers, and to ignore the IBD status check.
On macOS use faketime "@$t" instead.