Hey Guys, what's up?

Hope all are doing well.

Today we will discuss the types of blockchains inside the bitcoin network.

Interesting right?

Great!

Before starting this I am assuming you are aware of bitcoin and blockchain technology. If not, please read my previous articles here

Cool :)

You know bitcoin right? And also you know that bitcoin is powered by blockchain technology. You might be surprised to know that, there is more than one bitcoin blockchain. The "main" blockchain, the one created by Satoshi Nakamoto on Jan 3rd, 2009, is called the mainnet. There are other bitcoin blockchains that are used for the testing purpose are also available, those are testnet, segnet, and regtest.

Let's look at each :)

Testnet

Testnet (or Bitcoin's Testing Playground) is the name of the test blockchain, network, and currency that is used for testing purposes. As you know bitcoin is a decentralized system, once data is added to bitcoin it can't be modified or deleted. For that reason, we need to do the test before adding to bitcoin.

Got some idea?

let's look in more depth!

The testnet is a fully featured live P2P network, with wallets, test bitcoin, mining, and all the other feature of the mainnet. There are only two differences: testnet coins are meant to be worthless and mining difficulty should be low enough that everyone can mine testnet coins relatively easily.

Any software development that is intended for production use on bitcoin's mainnet should first be tested on the testnet with test coins, so that, it protects both the developers from monetary losses due to bugs and the network from unintended behavior due to bugs.

Eg:- testnet3(current version of testnet)

Segnet

Segnet or The Segregated Witness Testnet in launched in 2016. It is a special purpose testnet to aid in the development and testing of Segregated Witness. This test blockchain is called segnet and can be joined by running a special version(branch) of Bitcoin Core(original bitcoin).

Regtest

Regtest, which stands for Regression Testing, is a Bitcoin Core feature that allows you to create a local blockchain for testing purposes. Unlike testnet3, which is a public and shared test blockchain, the regtest blockchain is intended to run as a closed system for local testing.

I hope you got some idea about testing bitcoin blockchains.

Conclusion

Bitcoin's various blockchains (regtest, segnet, testnet3, mainnet) offer a range of testing environments for bitcoin development. Use the test blockchains whether you are developing for Bitcoin Core or an application such as a wallet, exchange, e-commerce site, etc.

This is a simple overview of testing blockchains inside the bitcoin network. I hope you got some idea like, what is a testnet, to regtest, and for what purpose we should use them.

Awesome!

Thanks for reading this article. See you soon with a new one!