Author: Andreas Schildbach 2016-03-12 14:40:11
Published on: 2016-03-12T14:40:11+00:00
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process has a problem with referring to multiple orthogonal "sub-BIPs". BIP32 faces this issue as all HD wallets implement the derivation part of BIP32 but almost none implement the hierarchy part. Trying to split BIP32 into two BIPs without any content changes was declined due to its final state. However, there is no harm in using a BIP only for a small thing, and BIP numbers are infinite.A proposal was made by James MacWhyte on March 1, which was tentatively assigned number 75 and changed title to "Out of Band Address Exchange using Payment Protocol Encryption" to be more accurate. Some optional fields were added to the BIP70 paymentDetails message including subtractable fee, fee per kb, and replace by fee. The purpose of these extensions is to clarify the fee and nothing to do with secure and authenticated bi-directional BIP70 communication. Andreas Schildbach via bitcoin-dev thinks it is a bad idea to pollute the original idea of this BIP with other extensions. Other extensions should go to separate BIPs. James MacWhyte, on the other hand, sees BIP75 as a general modernization of BIP70 and thinks it should be fine to include these extensions in the new BIP, even though these fields are not specific to the features they are proposing. In general, the BIP process is used to propose changes to the Bitcoin protocol, and it is important to adhere to the process to maintain the integrity of the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T04:30:17.553082+00:00