This is a free write, thoughts regarding discussion in the #altcoins channel of dashnation 
chat.  I am just an interested altcoin observer who is new to the Dash community.

Right now, Ethereum Geth client developers have still not released a client update to address
the second testnet to suffer a deadly blow from malicious hack, this time inflicted on Ropsten 
testnet by person(s) mining with gpu in the Ethereum  sandbox and giving them a huge stockpile 
of ether to interfere with testnet syncs and deployments being tested by Ethereum  developers.  

RIP Ropsten.  Born November 2016  Deceased late February 2017

The Geth developer crew has decided they will alter the mining algo to a Proof of Authority
model that will keep blacklists of account addresses that will limit malicious activity in the 
sandbox while keeping their mainnet with their present Ethash PoW algo.  I don't know how
the client devs are going to reconcile this difference in protocol for testing Dapps and actually
deploying them on the blockchain, but they are a rockstar crew and have fixed other issues
in reasonable amounts of time with debugging and ensuring Geth/Mist run smoothly.  

Now when I say reasonable amount of time, it can be a time frame of several weeks while
miners and other users sync their nodes again to deliver enough hashing power to raise
block gas limits back to typical levels.  Blah blah, look at me, I am a 53 year old simian who
uses crypto lingo for fun and analysis.  (I began observing Ethereum Git channels as a novice
user in March of last year and have weathered, seen and learned a lot.)

So, what is a reasonable solution to have a low cost, but not no cost testnet sandbox for
testing smart contracts using an Ethereum protocol client?  Tum ta ta tom tom tom!

Ethereum Classic

ETC is not free but is cheap compared to having to test smart contracts on the Ethereum
mainnet with ETH hovering at $40 USD level.  Testing new contracts have a significant
failure rate in creation and deployment of contract data that will be executed from the
contact address.  Testing a Dapp that will cost significant gas costs to deploy in Ethereum
would be much cheaper to on the Classic blockchain during early debugging and 
development.

ETC has remained relatively stable in price and market cap with the 6 highest liquidity
on Coingecko, even though they are ranked in the second 30 page at 37 of of last time I
checked.  Ethereum Classic could be a low cost alternative for Ethereum Dapp and
smart contract testing.  Using Ethereum Classic would also allow developers to test
application interoperability in a low cost live fire environment.

Now Ethereum Classic does still use the Geth 1.4 series blockstructure as compared
to the current Ethereum Geth 1.5.9 client which could cause a few a bugs in having
these Ethereum Classic tested contracts moved to the Ethereum Mainnet, but over
all $USD gas costs would be lower for testing and debugging, since both blockchains
still use a fixed .05 per million gas per ETH or ETC as the case may be.

Boy, this is a lot more writing than I planned to do on this subject.  the other advantage
of this is that Ethereum Classic uses Ethash PoW mining, same as Ethereum mainnet
which may actually reduce the potential contract failures due to bugs compared to
the new proposed Ethereum testnet that will use Proof of Authority.

Anyway, it's 6:30 AM and I have rambled on to the point where nobody who opened
this article is reading this sentence.  Ho hum,

ETH Git and Dashnation handle:  agnewpickens

meme courtesy of the interwebz.  
Hooked on Crypto

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