[Bitcoin-development] BIP 18 (or not?)

Amir Taaki zgenjix at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 14 15:07:29 UTC 2012


Hi,

luke-jr withdrew BIP 16 and put forwards support for BIP 17. So now there's a consensus to move forwards.

However he submitted BIP 18 to me today. From looking it over, I'm not even sure the idea is tenable nor see the purpose when we are adopting BIP 17. Personally I'd rather not see a high turnover in protocol design when something works (now that we have viable multisig transactions) even compromising on the position of a perfect design.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0018

Usually for a BIP, someone submits it to me, I review to see whether the idea is technically sound (not making judgements on the validity), the community discusses the idea and I evaluate the support at the end to change the status. In general I try to accept all BIPs in the interests of fairness, rather than holding a vote or being the executioner.

"Once the champion has asked the Bitcoin community as to whether an idea has any chance of acceptance, a draft BIP should be presented to bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net. This gives the author a chance to flesh out the draft BIP to make properly formatted, of high quality, and to address initial concerns about the proposal.
Following a discussion, the proposal should be sent to the Bitcoin-dev list with the draft BIP and the BIP editors <BIPs at Bitcoin.org>. This draft must be written in BIP style as described below, else it will be sent back without further regard until proper formatting rules are followed."

I don't think BIP 18 has followed this discussion before being accepted. Neither have many other BIPs as we're a small community, and so far we avoided this unneeded level of bureaucracy. However I think this is a good thing to do here.

Should BIP 18 be accepted into the repo or not?

"The BIP editor will not unreasonably deny a BIP. Reasons for denying BIP status include duplication of effort, being technically unsound, not providing proper motivation or addressing backwards compatibility, or not in keeping with the Bitcoin philosophy."

"For a BIP to be accepted it must meet certain minimum criteria. It must be a clear and complete description of the proposed enhancement. The enhancement must represent a net improvement. The proposed implementation, if applicable, must be solid and must not complicate the protocol unduly."

(quotes from BIP 1)




More information about the bitcoin-dev mailing list