[bitcoin-dev] [BIP/Draft] BIP Realistic Acceptance Process

[Andy Chase via bitcoin-dev]

Mediawiki formatted documented: 
https://gist.github.com/andychase/dadbfbb145de934d8e1c

——

Title: BIP Realistic Acceptance Process
Author: Andy Chase 
Status: Draft 
Type: Process 
Created: 2015-09-06

Abstract


The current process for accepting a BIP is not clearly defined. While
BIP-0001 defines the process for writing and submitting a Bitcoin
improvement proposal to the community it does not specify the precise
method for which BIPs are considered accepted or rejected.

This proposal documents the current method for which BIPs are accepted
or rejected.

Due to the large number of BIPs and the different processes that were
followed, this BIP is specifically based around the acceptance process
of BIP-0064. This was picked because it picks up a lot of the edge cases
that BIPs often have.

Motivation
==

The primary motivation of this document is to allow for a discussion on
a realistic and acceptable BIP acceptance procedure. There has been a
quite few calls for documenting and using the current "realistic" method
for BIP acceptance:

Luke Jr.

> Any such a BIP like this needs to document the natural forces involved
> in real-world acceptance \[...\] it needs to be reasonably accurate so
> as to not change the outcome from its natural/necessary result.

Btc Drak

> I'm rather perplexed about \[another acceptance\] proposal. What
> exactly is wrong with the existing BIPs process?

Peter Todd

> IMO trying to "set up a system" in that kind of environment is silly,
> and likely to be a bureaucratic waste of time.

Adam Back

> The development process is to improve Bitcoin, not to randomly
> redefine it on a whim of one guy's opinion, nor the devs opinion.

Copyright
=

This document is placed into the public domain.

Process
===

This game works best with at least 3 people and a basic familiarity with
the BIP process.

-   Story: You are a confident software superstar who has worked at
Hooli and has taken up a passion for Bitcoin. You've realized that
you need a specific protocol in Bitcoin core for an application you
are working on. You've been funded a lot of money for this project
so you don't really have any option but to try to put it into the
core protocol.
-   Rules:
-   Each turn counts as a day
-   You can prevent anyone from taking a drink at any time by
handing them a buck, looking into their eyes and saying "we are
the future of Bitcoin"
-   If you can't remember a word replace it with the word
"consensus"
-   If try to take a drink but are out, you must try to explain what
a "fork" is to the person on your left in the most complicated
way possible.
-   Start:
-   Take a turn drawing up your implementation (draw a picture
of something)
-   Hand the "implementation" to the person on your left who writes
down words explaining the picture in the abstract using
big words. Hand it back. This is your BIP Draft.
-   Roll die, number rolled is the number of required elements
from BIP-0001 that you included in your BIP draft
-   take a drink for each element you included
-   If you rolled a 6 oops you didn't include a
copyright declaration. Nothing happens.
-   Submit for comments on mailing list
-   For three turns, receive criticism. Each turn:
-   Someone says your proposal is trash! take a drink and
roll a die:
-   If 1-2: Smash your hand on the table with your other
hand and take out the pain on the person to your
right who is criticizing your proposal. Take a drink
to ease the pain.
-   If 3-4: Make an ad hominem statement about the
person on the right. Look them in the eye and take a
smug sip.
-   If 5-6: Ignore it. Do nothing.
-   Finish your drink if you get any positive remarks or
constructive feedback about your BIP (in other words don't
finish your drink).
-   Submit draft pull request to bitcoin/bip.
-   Story: Congrats! This represents an important milestone in
the BIP process. You put in the effort to get the BIP draft
vetted and you are ready to perform the janitorial task of
publicly submitting your BIP into the official BIP repo for
the world to see and refer to. The road ahead won't be easy,
there's rules to obey and guidelines to follow. Think this
will be quick and painless? Think again, a bit of short
sidedness or a forgotten rebase will cost you time, and time
is money.
-   Setup (1 turn):
-   Take a drink and roll a 6 sided die. Now self-assign a
BIP number based on that. Say: "I'm not sure what the
   

Re: [bitcoin-dev] [BIP/Draft] BIP Acceptance Process

[Andy Chase via bitcoin-dev]

Dang you are right Thomas! I'm just pretty excited about this proposal and
sparking a discussion on this issue.

Here's some updates and thoughts:

   - Luke said: "BIPs wouldn't be recognised as such because nobody cares
   to meet the higher requirements"
  - Possibly true, but maybe not! I think people like having a say
  especially people with a lot of money on the line or those who are really
  passionate about Bitcoin
  - One counter example, I emailed all the sponsors of the workshop
  conference about their stance in regards to scalability going into the
  workshop and I got a 47% response rate (with 21% responding with
a concrete
  answer). See here:
  
https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3isqmf/which_of_the_scaling_bitcoin_conference_sponsors/cujg3vc
  - One example that agrees with you, I talked to the #bitcoin-assets
  community and they seemed very against participating in future
BIPs or even
  allowing discussion with people outside their community:
  http://pastebin.com/H5WeNwu3
   - I'm seeking a historian or political science expert to assist me in
   this area. If you guys know any I'd be glad to talk to them about working
   with them.
   - Many people are complaining about the stake part, and are worried
   about the ambiguity. I firmly believe that proof of stake is a poor voting
   mechanism because it gives the most power to those that have a lot of
   money.
  - I think proof of stake might work for merchants to prove they have
  a decent economic stake if they sign with a well-known cold
wallet address,
  but I agree with someone that said merchants may be hesitant about doing
  that.


On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 6:36 AM, Thomas Kerin  wrote:

> Normally allocation comes after about 2 weeks or so, not 2 days!
> On 5 Sep 2015 10:20 pm, "Andy Chase via bitcoin-dev" <
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Okay for sure yeah writing another proposal that reflects the current
>> state of affairs as people see it might provide some interesting
>> perspective on this proposal. I would welcome that.
>>
>> Greg: With no other direct comments appearing to be inbound I'd like to
>> move forward with this one and get a number assigned to it. Thanks!
>>
>> Thanks to all for the discussion!
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Luke Dashjr  wrote:
>>
>>> On Friday, September 04, 2015 9:36:42 PM Andy Chase wrote:
>>> > I understand your concerns. What kinds of changes do you think should
>>> go
>>> > through a process like this? Just hard forks?
>>>
>>> The process loses meaning if it doesn't reflect reality. So only
>>> hardforks
>>> should go through the hardfork process; only softforks through the
>>> softfork
>>> process; etc. Trying to make one-size-fits-all just means de facto
>>> accepted
>>> BIPs wouldn't be recognised as such because nobody cares to meet the
>>> higher
>>> requirements.
>>>
>>> Luke
>>>
>>
>>
>> ___
>> bitcoin-dev mailing list
>> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>>
>>
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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Proposal to add the bitcoin symbol to Unicode

[Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev]

On Sat, Sep 05, 2015 at 07:11:27AM -0700, Ken Shirriff via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Use of the bitcoin symbol in text is inconvenient, because the bitcoin
> symbol isn't in the Unicode standard. To fix this, I've written a proposal
> to have the common B-with-vertical-bars bitcoin symbol added to Unicode.
> I've successfully proposed a new character for Unicode before, so I'm
> familiar with the process and think this has a good chance of succeeding.
> The proposal is at http://righto.com/bitcoin-unicode.pdf
> 
> I received a suggestion to run this proposal by the bitcoin-dev group, so I
> hope this email is appropriate here. Endorsement by Bitcoin developers will
> help the Unicode Committee realize the importance of adding this symbol, so
> please let me know if you support this proposal.

ACK

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[bitcoin-dev] python-bitcoinlib-v0.5.0rc1 - OpenSSL crashes on OSX and Arch Linux should be fixed

[Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev]

https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib/tree/python-bitcoinlib-v0.5.0rc1

FWIW if you've been experienceing OpenSSL related crashes on OSX or Arch
Linux this release should fix your issues. I don't have any way of
testing this myself, so if I could get some confirmation that this new
release candidate fixes things that'd be really helpful!


Other release notes:

v0.5.0
==

Major fix: Fixed OpenSSL related crashes on OSX and Arch Linux. Big thanks to
everyone who helped fix this!

Breaking API changes:

* Proxy no longer has ``__getattr__`` to support arbitrary methods. Use
  RawProxy or Proxy.call instead. This allows new wrappers to be added safely.
  See docstrings for details.

New features:

* New RPC calls: getbestblockhash, getblockcount, getmininginfo
* Signing and verification of Bitcoin Core compatible messages. (w/ pubkey 
recovery)
* Tox tests
* Sphinx docs

Notable bugfixes:

* getinfo() now works where disablewallet=1

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