Also an important question: How to get quickly tokens for a ETH test network to be able to do anything. Last time I tried I wasn't successful because all these places where you could get some free tokens didn't work and the only thing possible was to mine them yourself which still took a day or two.
You’ll never be able to avoid the monetary incentives anymore outside of using a testnet. Ethereum testnets have real Dapps on them that you can use. You can also use layer 2 networks on top of Ethereum to avoid high transaction costs.
One common use is to test out your new contract code without using real ethereum. You could even imagine a time where you could run a fuzzer on your contract to try to find bugs.
Personally I don't think there's a real risk of exposing your real Ethereum wallet by setting up a testnet, as long as you only let localhost connect to it.
ETH is expensive but there are other "cheaper" blockchains compatible with ETH whose "gas" price is negligible. You can also deploy for free on the "testnet"
it's a separate testing bitcoin blockchain. you can get test coins from bitcoin testnet faucets (see link above).
If you want to try out Ethereum and write a smart contract, you want to test it for free so not on the real ethereum chain. Same principle, you can just try your smart contract on the Ethereum testnet (ropsten I think but whatever) for which you can get test ether from ethereum testnet faucets (faucet being the keyword you want to get free test coins for various blockchains)
This is appealing as a way for testing contracts without paying the rediculously high gas price. However is there any advantage of this over the test Etherium network?
I have almost no idea about the Ethereum system, but don't you have to pay to have your code executed on the global ethereum machine? Does that mean I have to pay to test run my code? or maybe after I deploy it?
While developing, you would do it either on the dev (local, not connected) or testnet. Both these are easily mineable (I have 10k's on both), so there is nothing stopping you to actually playing around and putting together a dapp without having real ETH in your pocket.
No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.
Go through the intro Solidity / Ethereum project on buildspace, it's free. They do a live kickoff on Twitch and then the rest can be done at your own pace in a day. I think it is worthwhile to try it out for yourself - make a simple React UI, use ethers.js to connect a wallet, and interact with a smart contract. Deploy to a test network.
You shouldn't use the main ethereum network when testing smart contracts - develop on a local testnet and then if you want, on a public testnet (eg rinkeby or ropesten) first
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