Topic: Can someone explain the meaning behind the BIPs? (Read 876 times)

apparently the core devs aren't following the rule     


http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdf


Here’s the raw text tl;dr:

Protocol changes proposed:
1. Hard fork, to
2. Remove static 1MB block size limit.
3. Simultaneously, add a new floating block size limit, set to 1MB.
4. The historical 32MB limit remains.
5. Schedule the hard fork on testnet for September 1, 2015.
6. Schedule the hard fork on bitcoin main chain for January 11, 2016.
7. Changing the 1MB limit is accomplished in a manner similar to BIP 34, a one­way lock­in upgrade with a 12,000 block (3 month) threshold by 90% of the blocks.
8. Limit increase or decrease may not exceed 2x in any one step.
9. Miners vote by encoding ‘BV’+BlockSizeRequestValue into coinbase scriptSig, e.g. “/BV8000000/” to vote for 8M. Votes are evaluated by dropping bottom 20% and top 20%, and then the most common floor (minimum) is chosen.


This has been emailed to gmaxwell as described so that it can be amended to the list.

Thanks Frank, that's what I was looking for.  I wasn't sure if it was a bitcoin only thing and how they came up with the numbers.

For the content of each individual BIP, you can check https://github.com/bitcoin/bips for the details. I have no idea about the numbering convention though.

bip means bitcoin improvement proposal.  I don't think there is a formal convention behind the numbering scheme, just that its increased to a larger number  when a new one is created. 

Take a step back - there is a public bitcoin developers mailing list.  Anyone can sign up.  The community encourages everyone who wishes to work on or contribute to bitcoin core, to use this mailing list and subscribe to it.  The goal is that a developer will come up with a great idea then he will discuss it with other users on the mailing list to gain feedback about it.  If the feedback is overtly positive or at least agreed upon but given some constructive feedback, THEN, the developer is encouraged to formalize his proposal with a synopsis that includes sample code for implementation, test results of such implementation as well as the benefits of implementing such change.  This 'proposal' is a new BIP!  it gets drafted and submitted to github, and one of the bitcoin project committers places it into the BIP directory, which is hosted on github. From there, I'm not sure how the core developers choose which ones to implement and how they go about moving forward.  I think things all started breaking down once we got to bip101 - its a formalized proposal that is essentially XT (8mb blocks with doubling each year until 2032 when the blocksize is expected to be as large as up to 8GB), but it seems that the core developers have a fundamental disagreement as to the implementation of it or which one to implement (bip 102 is Jeff Garziks conservative 2mb increase), (bip103 is Pieter's De Wiulle's proposal to do gradual blocksize increases on a much longer timescale.

So I've seen plenty of them, BIP 100, BIP 101, BIP 66, BIP 32. Is this just a naming convention that is used for bitcoin? How do they come up with the # after the BIP because they don't seem to go in any apparent order. What are the BIPs, what does BIP stand for and what's the meaning behind them?