Hey Greg,
Two sections from BIP 3 stand out as relevant here, “BIP Ownership“ and
“Deployed Process BIPs”.
From “Fundamentals > BIP Ownership”:
> “[…] As a BIP progresses through the workflow, it becomes
increasingly co-owned by the Bitcoin community.”
While Deployed BIPs are considered final and changes should be avoided,
the section has a subsection that specifically addresses Process BIPs.
From “Workflow > Progression through BIP Statuses > Deployed > Process
BIPs”:
> “A Process BIP may change status from Complete to Deployed when it
achieves rough consensus on the Bitcoin Development Mailing List. A
proposal is said to have rough consensus if its advancement has been
open to discussion on the mailing list for at least one month, the
discussion achieved meaningful engagement, and no person maintains any
unaddressed substantiated objections to it. Addressed or obstructive
objections may be ignored/overruled by general agreement that they have
been sufficiently addressed, but clear reasoning must be given in such
circumstances. Deployed Process BIPs may be modified indefinitely as
long as a proposed modification has rough consensus per the same criteria.”
More specific rules supersede general rules, so this subsection on
Process BIPs should hopefully clearly override the general description
in “Deployed”. It follows from these two sections that the BIP Authors’
right to decide about changes to their BIP is moderated by the community
interests. I would consider especially Process BIPs to be dominantly
owned by the community rather than the Authors once they are Deployed.
The quoted section states how they are modified — by proposing and
discussing a modification on the mailing list, which is also a
fitting summary of how we decided last year to add more BIP Editors.
Additionally, the “Workflow > Transferring BIP Ownership” section makes
it clear that other Owners could step up to replace Authors that have
become unreachable.
Pragmatically speaking, it seems obvious that the list of BIP Editors
would be amended in the currently active BIP Process Specification
whenever the active BIP Editors change. Historically, this worked fine
when Editors changed while BIP 1 and BIP 2 were active which both also
specified the current BIP Editors in the same manner.
Thank you for your review. Please let me know, if you think we should
amend BIP 3 to more clearly state any of the above discussed thoughts.
Best,
Murch
On 2025-11-12 11:03, Greg Sanders wrote:
Hello Murch,
I really like the BIP, just have a question about the editor portion.
The list of current editors are currently in the BIP text, which seems
to imply that the list can be changed by the author himself only and
would become "static" over time.
Clearly support for changing has to continue as it goes to Deployed
and beyond. Perhaps the text should be moved elsewhere?
Best,
Greg
On Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 8:11:39 PM UTC-5 Murch wrote:
Dear list,
After planned work on BIP 3⁰ finished in February, BIP 3 was
advanced to
Proposed in March 2025¹. A few minor adjustments were made to BIP 3
since then (see below). I have since April maintained a pull request
that would activate BIP 3: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1820.
At this point, BIP 3 has received over 600 comments on GitHub and has
been discussed in multiple threads on this list. The proposal has
been
Proposed for over seven months, and while several minor improvements
were proposed and processed, the proposal has no unaddressed
objections
stated here or on the activation pull request. A growing list of
people
has expressed explicit support for activating BIP 3 by leaving an
ACK on
the pull request after reviewing the BIP:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1820#issue-2990155954
I formally propose a motion to adopt BIP 3 to replace BIP 2 as our
BIPs
Process.
Since BIP 2 doesn’t specify a procedure for activating Process
BIPs, I
suggest that people who wish to state their support leave an ACK on
#1820 or reply in this thread. Similarly, I would like to invite
anyone
to state concerns or raise objections here or on #1820.
While BIP 3 has long been proposed and the activation PR has been
open
for over half a year, I suggest that we give all would-be reviewers
another four weeks, until 2025-12-02, before evaluating whether
there is
rough consensus for merging the activation pull request. This
should be
ample time to review and discuss BIP 3 as well as the activation PR,
even for people that have so far not engaged with the material.
Best,
Murch
----
Summary of changes since BIP 3 was advanced to Proposed:
- The License header now uses SPDX License Expressions²
- The License-Code header was dropped in favor of requiring that the
license terms of the auxiliary files be specified in the respective
directory or folder per a license header or LICENSE file²
- The “Created” header has been renamed to “Assigned”³
- The BIP text has been improved to clarify:
- the purpose of the BIPs repository⁴
- that authors should establish viability of their proposal on the
mailing list⁴
- the distinction between publication, acceptance, and adoption of
proposals⁴
- when Draft BIPs can be closed due to not making progress⁴
- that BIPs submissions may not be generated by AI/LLM⁵
⁰ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0003.md
¹ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1794
² https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1892
³ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1970
⁴ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1819
⁵ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2006
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