Bitcoin Improvement Proposals

[Gavin Andresen]

Amir started the "get more formal about changes to bitcoin" ball rolling by creating BIP 0001, starting from the Python "PEP" / BitTorrent "BEP" processes.

The idea is to use BIPs for changes that may or will affect every bitcoin implementation (not to use them for proposed changes to one particular implementation).

I'd like to propose some minor changes to the process:

• I propose that BIPs be wiki pages, with a social convention that the Author gets final word if any editing wars break out.
• If he's willing, I propose that Amir take the role of BIP editor.
• I think bitcoin is still too small to have a specialized "bitcoin-ideas" mailing list; I propose that new potential BIPs be discussed either here or on the bitcoin-dev mailing list.

[kokjo]

+1

[nibor]

Gavin,

Could you list some example BIP's to get the ball rolling and ensure everyone understands the sort/scale of changes you were thinking of.

Would:
Add GetHeaders and ability to get 100's at a time to allow faster blockchain download for new clients.

be an example?

Thanks

[Gavin Andresen]

Example possible BIPs:

URL syntax for bitcoin payments

New OP_EVAL scripting opcode for receiver-specifies-transaction

New bitcoin address format to support OP_EVAL

(I'm actually working on those two)


Informational:

Process for announcing/scheduling/implementing a potentially block-chain-splitting change.

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You can browse through the PEP's at http://www.python.org/dev/peps/  to get some idea of the kinds of things that might be good BIPs; changes to the on-the-wire protocol to make blockchain downloads faster would certainly be appropriate.

[Isosceles]

+1 for bitcoin URLs

This would definitely improve accessibility for new users. Giving someone a address like btc://152LaGV4xS9SzUTu2yKb6nGwyuxqJEkFZA is more user-friendly and you have the potential for extending the address protocol, eg. btc://MyReadablePublicBTCAddress or btc://username.mtgox for MtGox tokens

[finway]

Finally.

[Stephen Gornick]

Which feature additions warrant a BIP and which don't?

I see a lot of pull requests and not very often a BIP, so I'm guessing there's a threshold there somewhere..

 - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls

[gmaxwell]

Which feature additions warrant a BIP and which don't?

Bips are for things with network wide impact or at least are client interface features that would be implemented by multiple clients.