Laika - A perpetual Testchain / onboarding opportunity

I would like to see a permanent testchain that is upgraded before the primary chain. In order to flush out and avoid issues like we are seeing with the Granada upgrade ( and the kinds we have come across in the past ).

The proposal testnets (such as Florencenet and Granadanet) are upgraded before mainnet. The transition from Florence to Granada in particular was tested on the Granadanet.

What is special about the testnet being permanent? How would this help detecting these kinds of issues?

I think a testchain where the value of the coin is forced to zero ( thereby making all transactions non-taxable ) could be used as an onboarding opportunity for people to learn crypto without risk.

How does this differ from the current situation? Testnet tokens are worthless because you can get them for free at the faucet.

Testchains like edonet or florencnet are not the same thing. They are forever on that one protocol.

Not exactly, they start on the predecessor protocol precisely because we also want to test the migration. They migrate in the early days of the testnet, usually through an on-chain vote.

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Quite a lot of code would have to be written (and tested!) to allow to roll-back protocol upgrades. For example, if a protocol introduces a new Michelson instruction and some smart contracts are originated with it what should we do about them?

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We tried a variation of this for several upgrades (until Florence), the main problem is that because testchain tokens are worthless, a deny-of-service attack on a testchain node is cheap so it is not a good idea to run a baker on the same machine than a testchain node. See Draft: Add a draft for the deactivation of the test chain (!141) · Merge requests · Tezos / tzip · GitLab for the other reasons to deactivate this feature.

I don’t see the relationship between the adoption period and testing. The adoption period is about uncertainty on the result of the promotion vote.

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Deny-Of-Service can and had happened on mainnet too, actually every upgrade always come with some level of “Deny”-Of-Service attack, that’s why I said it’s even more valuable for testing purpose. One or some big bakers can literially performance Deny-Of-Service attach by accident, and our chain should survival in such situation as much as it can. This is actually another area Tezos should improve, for example binance, coinbase and all TF bakers offline for what ever reason for several cycles, Tezos blockchain in theory should slowly back to normal rather than be impacted for all that period.

No need to make the testchain token valuable at all, some small incentive can be done by TF using the delegation as bonus etc would be enough to onboard enough bakers.

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What do we need to test on this network?

I am interested in feedback from the dev groups on what they would like to test. At bare minimum the great value I see is the having a place to test a proposal before it is even voted for. Competing dev teams could bid on who gets to have their protocol tested. This could help fund the chain.

Should the test networks run the same protocol as mainnet or a patched version?

The Aristotelian mean we should reach for is, similar enough to the mainnet that the tests are relevant / valuable but not so similar that it competes with the mainnet or could be used to deceive / scam others.

The addresses should be different and the great effort should be made to distinguish both chains. It should not be possible (if possible) to send tokens from the mannet to the testchain or vice versa.

What power should the admin have?

The more the better. Destroy tokens, magic any amount into any address, Invalidate a baker etc… To make sure the testnet does not experience lag from baker drop off, until baking is stable, the vast majority of the network should be validated by testnet foundation bakeries.

What is the plan for the network to be self sustaining?

To begin with, self funding, donations / community funding and possibly foundation funding ( without relying on it ).

IMO the best avenue is commercialization through turning the testnet into a crypto noob onboarding platform. A modicum of ad space in wallets and webpages should pay for the network. This is also a means of obtaining organic traffic on the test chain which simulated networks cannot achieve.

Another eventual avenue for funding is for dev teams to be able to take over the network at a cost to them. The network would take a snapshot of it’s state before the test, after the test is over the snapshot is reloaded and the network picks up where it left off.

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I don’t think many people would pay to learn to be a baker right now. There just isn’t a cost benefit to it. Also website advertisements don’t pay that much money. I’m not sure if the revenue stream ideas you bring up match the e goals of the testnet, unless I am misunderstanding them. Also you would have to find someone passionate about all these areas and connect them all together if you really think it will work.

You’re misunderstanding my proposal.

Not looking to have people pay to learn to bake. You market and offer the perpetual Tezos testnet as a tool for people with no experience in crypto to learn how to use it with no risk. This brings users to the ads. Ads are highly lucrative done right, and should provide plenty enough revenue to pay for the network. Tezos is economically efficient after all.

I have been evangelizing crypto since 2013, often to groups of people. I spent last week at Art Basel doing the same. I am quite confident there is demand for such a thing. It would also be a great place for devs to learn blockchain at no cost or risk. This I believe could be a breakout mechanism for Tezos.

Also, there is the DAO option I eluded to in the OP for initial bootstrapping.

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Weren’t you the one advocating to let people pay ~$100 to start baking on Kaizen? It’s literally in your original proposal Kaizen - A perpetual, incentivized, every-improving testnet

No, the actual incentivization would come mo the down the line. Please reread the proposal.

Baking would be free with the hopes that we could get it incentivized months down the line. All projects need funding or hope of compensation. People need to feed their families.

More in general, what’s the main underlying reason for rewarding users of this perpetual testchain?

If you’re a developer or Tezos enthusiast the intrinsic value for wanting to run a testnet baker is to support the community and to enable developers (including yourself) to have a reliable way to test dapps before deploying smart contracts to mainnet.

We’ve been running protocol proposal testnets for a while now and I don’t understand why there have been such strong discussions lately about monetary incentives for testnets. IMO these incentives shouldn’t be an hard requirement for running a perpetual testnet. I agree they would help keep the testnet bakers more accountable but the rewards could be implemented at a later stage.

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I largely agree with where you are coming from and agree that there is enough intrinsic value in running a perpetual testnet that it should not be hard to have a large portion of the network ran by bakers and supporters. Hopefully the whole thing with a DAO holding the admin keys one day.

I don’t think things will start that way though and to guarantee the networks uptime and actually happening, I would not want to rely on volunteer validators. That means expenses in terms of machines and bandwidth.

There are also costs around dev time for customizing the code here and there and making adjustments.

I personally want to champion Laika as a risk free on-boarding tool for newcomers to crypto. That means paying devs to fork wallets, then that also means support etc… I think those things will pay for themselves via ads, donations and price action for Tezos, but not necessarily right away.

Maybe eventually a Laika DAO could amass enough donated Tez that it’s baking rewards pay for it’s operation.

The only way to fund this is by donations from private individuals or TF donations, or with a monetary emission inflationary tax.

@tezosfoundation doubtly will not donate any to fund this initiative, we have seen this with the failed LB experiment (that we still funding it by the way), they could had perfectly fund LB with their block rewards but they turned a blind eye and we had to fund it ourselves by taxing ourselves with monetary emission.

The thing is that TF is extremely conservative with the war-chest, to the point that we can’t call that conservative anymore, but miserable.

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You’re welcome to believe that and live the consequences of it. I’m not gonna be limited by your lack of initiative and creativity.

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

My fault, should never have engaged the troll.

"Im being creative and taking the initiative.

Let’s part from the axiom that money doesn’t grow in trees and the highly improbable outcome of TF or private individuals funding this with donations.

I propose, to shutdown LB and redirect that tax of 0.3% annual inflation to fund Perpetual Test Net.

We would be getting much more value out of
funding the PTNet than funding LB that is more than obvious by now that we are not getting any value from LB.

Just don’t fund both things with inflation, because that would be too much fiscal pressure on everyone’s bags.

Just to compare and give some perspective, if we fund LB and PTNET with 0.3% annual tax (a total of 0.6% annual tax) that would be too much fiscal pressure for a cryptocurrency. In perspective Texas property tax is about 1.8% annually.

So, the idea, is to shutdown LB and take that same tax funding to fund PTNET. Or wait with crossed arms until TF finally decides to stop being miserable. Basically 90% of TF grants are funding nomadic labs, which is more than obvious by now that NL is TF same people."

Don’t use my thread for your inane “tax” rambling, take it to your own post.

Please stop censoring my messages, you already have fame as a censurer, you are a mod in all tezos channels, and you can’t have the monopoly of communications. I will keep posting my opinion in all the threads you start in this forum, this should be a public space free of censorship, now if you excuse me I will quote what you deleted:

Im being creative and taking the initiative.

Let’s part from the axiom that money doesn’t grow in trees and the highly improbable outcome of TF or private individuals funding this with donations.

I propose, to shutdown LB and redirect that tax of 0.3% annual inflation to fund Perpetual Test Net.

We would be getting much more value out of
funding the PTNet than funding LB that is more than obvious by now that we are not getting any value from LB.

Just don’t fund both things with inflation, because that would be too much fiscal pressure on everyone’s bags.

Just to compare and give some perspective, if we fund LB and PTNET with 0.3% annual tax (a total of 0.6% annual tax) that would be too much fiscal pressure for a cryptocurrency. In perspective Texas property tax is about 1.8% annually.

So, the idea, is to shutdown LB and take that same tax funding to fund PTNET. Or wait with crossed arms until TF finally decides to stop being miserable. Basically 90% of TF grants are funding nomadic labs, which is more than obvious by now that NL is TF same people.

LB is funded by an inflationary tax, perpetual test chain can also be funded that way. LB will NOT give any value to tezos until USDC is here, in the meantime let’s shut down LB and fund perpetual test chain with the same 0.3% annual inflationary tax that is being used to fund LB.

My apologies for not having responded to this months ago.

The proposal testnets (such as Florencenet and Granadanet) are upgraded before mainnet. The transition from Florence to Granada in particular was tested on the Granadanet.
What is special about the testnet being permanent? How would this help detecting these kinds of issues?

At the time of this original post, I was not aware of that. Now I see the value here in a perp-testnet, being the community as a whole and bakers more prepared for what to expect. Also, it serves as a redundancy and extra testing on a network with organic activity.

How does this differ from the current situation? Testnet tokens are worthless because you can get them for free at the faucet.

This is more for a perpetual testnet being less of an accounting burden for people to play and learn on and so that it is not a competitor with the mainnet.

Not exactly, they start on the predecessor protocol precisely because we also want to test the migration. They migrate in the early days of the testnet, usually through an on-chain vote.

Thank you for the correction.

It is just very simple, let’s tax print some XTZ to fund perpetual testnet. Don’t rely on TF because we will never get anything from them, NEVER. The only ones who get something from TF are nomadic labs and the salary of Jarrod.

They way I imagine it is that, first we give people realistic expectations. Warn them that the testnet is testing a proposal and that things might be rolled back so no transactions done in that time period are guaranteed.

Before testing the proposal we take a snapshot. If the upgrade goes smooth and the proposal is adopted by the mainnet. No worries. If the proposal breaks the testnet, or the proposal is not adopted by the mainnet, we revert to the snapshot.

Sure, this means practice/play activity on the testnet may not be perpetual, but… how often has a proposal broken mainnet or failed a stage of voting. Not saying this cannot or will not happen but it is unlikely. …and… if something is to be broken, it should be the perpetual testnet.

Edo was replaced by edo2 3 days before mainnet upgrade. Reverting from a snapshot feels hard to coordinate. Upgrading the testnet very shortly before mainnet will make this scenario less likely to happen.

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Ideally, the plan would be to test the dominant ( or the one willing to pay the most (at the discretion of the testnet) ) proposal, on the testnet, before it is even voted on.

I agree a network wide snapshot rollback would be a headache to coordinate, but since a testnet need not be decentralized, i think there are steps we can take here to mitigate that. For example the majority of the baking would be handled by official Laika nodes. Beyond that, we could have people baking over a certain amount need to agree to handle these kinds of situations.

In the beginning Laika should be robust and reliable even if all the non-offical / volunteer participants on the network are not.