We are preparing a new test network that will be a dry-run for the actual BTS 2.0 launch process. This means the following:
1. It will have 3 second blocks
2. It will have 1 real computer per witness (but we will control all initial witnesses)
3. There will only be 11 initial witnesses, and we will VOTE in more
4. We will have 1 hour maintenance intervals, this should increase reindexing time by a factor 12
5. We will have lower transfer fees for testing purposes
6. We will be producing price feeds for bitassets
7. We will be producing a Mac / Windows GUI distribution
8. There will be a new genesis file from a recent snapshot.
The GUI distributions will be available next week. This week we are focusing on our infrastructure.
Before we can launch this test network we are putting in some scheduled minor hard-forking changes that have built up over the past several weeks of the last test network.
Our goal for this network is to pretend it is the real launch and to have it go as smoothly as possible.