BIP 1 defines an ambiguous criteria for the Status field of BIPs, which is often a source of confusion.
Additionally, some BIPs have been adopted which are deemed unadvisable or unsafe by experts in the field, and there is no indication of this at present.
Finally, BIP 1 only allows a single copyright license generally considered deprecated, or publication under the public domain (which is not legally recognised in all jurisdictions).
This BIP intends to address these problems by more specifically defining the Status field, recommending a forum for people to comment on BIPs, and expanding the list of allowable BIP licenses.
==Copyright==
This BIP is dual-licensed under the Open Publication License and BSD 2-clause license.
Champions of a BIP may decide on their own to change the status between Draft, Deferred, or Withdrawn.
A BIP may only change status from Draft (or Rejected) to Accepted, when the author deems it is complete, has a working implementation (where applicable), and has community plans to progress it to the Final status.
BIPs should be changed from Draft or Accepted status, to Rejected status, upon request by any person, if they have not made progress in three years. Such a BIP may be changed to Draft status if the champion provides revisions that meaningfully address public criticism of the proposal, or to Accepted status if it meets the criteria required as described in the previous paragraph.
An Accepted BIP may progress to Final only when specific criteria reflecting real-world adoption has occurred. This is different for each BIP depending on the nature of its proposed changes, which will be expanded on below. Evaluation of this status change should be objectively verifiable, and/or be discussed on the development mailing list.
When a Final BIP is no longer relevant, its status may be changed to Replaced or Obsolete (which is equivalent to Replaced). This change must also be objectively verifiable and/or discussed.
A process BIP may change status from Draft to Active when it achieves consensus on the mailing list.
A soft-fork BIP strictly requires a clear miner majority expressed by blockchain voting (eg, using BIP 9), as well as not meeting the inverse criteria for a hard-fork BIP (that is, economic consensus may reject a soft-fork BIP despite miner adoption). Because of the possibility of changes to miner dynamics, especially in light of delegated voting (mining pools), it is highly recommended that a supermajority vote around 95% be required by the BIP itself, unless rationale is given for a lower threshold.
A hard-fork BIP requires consensus from the entire Bitcoin economy, particularly including those selling desirable goods and services in exchange for bitcoin payments, as well as Bitcoin holders who wish to spend or would spend their bitcoins (including selling for other currencies) differently in the event of such a hard-fork. Consensus must be expressed by de facto usage of the hard-fork in practice (ie, not merely expressing public support, although that is a good step to establish pre-Final status consensus to adopt a BIP). This consensus cannot be reached merely by a super-majority, except by literally forcing the minority to accept the hard-fork (whether this is viable or not is outside the scope of this document).
Peer services BIPs should be observed to be adopted by at least 1% of public listening nodes for one month.
API/RPC and application layer BIPs must be implemented by at least two independent and compatible software applications.
Software authors are encouraged to publish summaries of what BIPs their software supports to aid in verification of status changes. Good examples of this at the time of writing this BIP, can be observed in [https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/bips.md Bitcoin Core's doc/bips.md file] as well as [https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet/blob/master/wallet/README.specs Bitcoin Wallet for Android's wallet/README.specs file].
These criteria are considered objective ways to observe the de facto adoption of the BIP, and are not to be used as reasons to oppose or reject a BIP. Should a BIP become actually and unambiguously adopted despite not meeting the criteria outlined here, it should still be updated to Final status.
A proposal is said to have achieved consensus if it has been open to discussion in applicable forums for communication for at least one month, and has not maintained any substantiated objection by any person. Should objections to be made on a strictly obstructive basis, those obstructing may be ignored/overruled by agreement that they are merely being obstructive from all other persons involved in the discussion. Objections are assumed to be either substantiated or obstructive, and when giving a determination of an objection being obstructive, clear reasoning must be offered.
How is the entire Bitcoin economy defined by people selling goods/services and holders?
* For Bitcoin to function as a currency, it must be accepted as payment. Bitcoins have no value if you cannot acquire anything in exchange for them. If everyone accepting such payments requires a particular set of consensus rules, "bitcoins" are de facto defined by that set of rules - this is already the case today. If those consensus rules are expected to broaden (as with a hard-fork), those merchants need to accept payments made under the new set of rules, or they will reject "bitcoins" as invalid. Holders are relevant to the degree in that they choose the merchants they wish to spend their bitcoins with, and could also as a whole decide to sell under one set of consensus rules or the other, thus flooding the market with bitcoins and crashing the price.
Why aren't <x> included in the economy?
* Some entities may, to some degree, also be involved in offering goods and/or services in exchange for bitcoins, thus in that capacity (but not their capacity as <x>) be involved in the economy.
* Miners are not included in the economy, because they merely *rely on* others to sell/spend their otherwise-worthless mined produce. Therefore, they must accept everyone else's direction in deciding the consensus rules.
* Exchanges are not included in the economy, because they merely provide services of connecting the merchants and users who wish to trade. Even if all exchanges were to defect from Bitcoin, those merchants and users can always trade directly and/or establish their own exchanges.
* Developers are not included in the economy, since they merely write code, and it is up to others to decide to use that code or not.
But they're doing something important and have invested a lot in Bitcoin! Shouldn't they be included in such an important decision?
* This BIP does not aim to address what "should" be the basis of decisions. Such a statement, no matter how perfect in its justification, would be futile without some way to enforce it. The BIP process does not aim to be a kind of "governance" of Bitcoin, merely to provide a collaborative repository for proposing and providing information on standards. It can only hope to achieve accuracy in regard to the "Status" field by striving to reflect the reality of *how things actually are*, rather than *how they should be*.
* The group of miners is determined by the consensus rules for the dynamic-membership multi-party signature (for Bitcoin, the proof-of-work algorithm), which can be modified with a hard-fork. Thus, if the same conditions required to modify this group are met in opposition to a soft-fork, the miner majority supporting the soft-fork is effectively void because the economic consensus can decide to replace them with another group of would-be miners who do not support the soft-fork.
What is the ideal percentage of listening nodes needed to adopt peer services proposals?
* This is unknown, and set rather arbitrarily at this time. For a random selection of peers to have at least one other peer implementing the extension, 13% or more would be necessary, but nodes could continue to scan the network for such peers with perhaps some reasonable success. Furthermore, service bits exist to help identification upfront.
* If there is only one implementation of a specification, there is no other program for which a standard interface is used with or needed.
* Even if there are only two projects rather than more, some standard coordination between them exists.
What if a BIP is proposed that only makes sense for a single specific project?
* The BIP process exists for standardisation between independent projects. If something only affects one project, it should be done through that project's own internal processes, and never be proposed as a BIP in the first place.
Each BIP should, in its preamble, link to a Bitcoin Wiki page with a summary tone of the comments on that page. Reviewers of the BIP who consider themselves qualified, should post their own comments on this wiki page in [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages#Editing_conventions_on_talk_pages standard "Talk page" format]. If a BIP is not yet completed, reviewers should plan to review the new version and remove or revise their comments as applicable, updating the timestamp in the review. Reviews made prior to the complete version may be removed if they are no longer applicable and have not been updated in a timely manner (eg, within one month).
Pages must be named after the full BIP number (eg, "BIP 0001") and placed in the "BIP Comments" namespace. For example, the link for BIP 1 will be https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_Comments:BIP_0001 .
Summary tones may be chosen from the following, but this BIP does not intend to cover all possible nuances:
Will BIP comments be censored or limited to particular participants/"experts"?
* The Bitcoin Wiki moderators have control over that venue and may make reasonable moderation attempts. Admitted non-experts should refrain from commenting outside of their area of knowledge. However, comments should not be censored, and participation should be open to the public.
* If the Bitcoin Wiki were to abuse its position, the venue for comments can always be changed.
In addition, it is recommended that literal code included in the BIP be dual-licensed under the same license terms as the project it modifies. For example, literal code intended for Bitcoin Core would ideally be dual-licensed under the MIT license terms as well as one of the above with the rest of the BIP text.
* Some BIPs, especially consensus layer, may include literal code in the BIP itself which may not be available under the exact license terms of the BIP.
* Despite this, not all software licenses would be acceptable for content included in BIPs.
