Author: Melvin Carvalho 2021-04-27 19:43:40
Published on: 2021-04-27T19:43:40+00:00
A proposal to solve the mirroring issue of decentralized BIPs has been made by Greg Maxwell via bitcoin-dev mailing list. He suggests giving each BIP a genesis transaction ID that moves in time on the blockchain and mirrors the evolution in git using git commit hashes. This would provide the definitive HEAD of a BIP and its history, which can be reconstructed from any one transaction. Commit trees going offline can be mirrored and hosted on popular sites like Github or Gitlab. The proposal assigns BIP numbers in the Bitcoin repo and requires spending money on transactions, thus preventing some sybil attacks. David A. Harding also made recommendations regarding the BIP process, including adding additional editors, seeking the resignation of Luke Dashjr as BIP editor, and treating protocol documents outside the BIPs repository as first-class BIP documentation. He proposes an alternative to the BIPs system where anyone writing protocol documentation can post their idea to the mailing list and assign themselves a unique decentralized identifier starting with "bip-". They may also define a shorter alias that they encourage people to use. Implementations of BIPs link to the documents they implement, and the BIP editors provide a document template, guidelines, and a format linter. Harding's proposal helps address longstanding problems with the BIPs system such as many users thinking of documents in the BIPs repo as authoritative and development teams abandoning the BIPs process because they want complete control over their own documentation. The recommendations were developed based on conversations with stakeholders in the BIPs process but do not claim to speak for anyone else.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:33:54.869551+00:00