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Once again we entering unknown territory. With RChain’s unique components and features it is obvious that these needs to be technically examined closely within a testnet prior to the Mercury launch. This testnet can be seen as an alpha/beta release that will include all components and the full full features set we will see later on the mainnet. Besides other this will include:
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When many people will try to mess up with the system and are incentivised to attack and put load on it from different angles we can expect that things break. We will be able to find bugs that threaten the security such as consensus failure or or that provide possibilities to threaten the livesness liveness like ddos attacks on the network. Participants will run the software stack on various operating systems and hardware setups. We should expect build and runtime problems and reports for multiple setups. This way we can improve stability, compatibility and support on various platforms. Getting rid of every bug and problem reported during the testnet will overall increase the robustness of the network.
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