Author: W. J. van der Laan 2021-04-27 09:04:18
Published on: 2021-04-27T09:04:18+00:00
A recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list has brought up concerns about the current Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process. Matt Corallo suggested that the BIP process has failed and proposed protocol documents can be placed nearly anywhere with the same effect. David A. Harding agreed that decentralizing the BIPs process is a good idea and expressed his view that standardization should not be driven by any gatekeeping. He acknowledged the bottleneck issue of having 111 pull requests currently open at the bitcoin/bips repository, which may lead to the perception that there is some kind of gatekeeping in place. He hopes that adding more BIP editors can mitigate this. However, he also mentioned that some BIP authors do not respond anymore, leading to PRs lingering without fault from the BIP maintainers. This suggests that the BIP repository should mirror or aggregate the author's own work trees, and changes need to be proposed there instead of upstream. Overall, the discussion highlights the need for a more decentralized approach to the BIP process and a reflection on how it can better serve the community.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:33:11.914590+00:00