BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)
Tags: standards process, soft fork activation
What a BIP is
Changes to Bitcoin Core and the wider ecosystem go through an open process; Inventing Bitcoin names Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) as the pathway for ideas — reviewed in public, with code and discussion visible to anyone.
A BIP is a design document, not law: nodes choose what software to run; economic actors decide what they call “bitcoin.”
Source: raw/Books/izobretaem-bitkoin/glava-8.md
Activation in practice (examples from the blocksize war material)
The sources describe miner signaling thresholds (e.g. 95% of blocks in a difficulty period) used for several soft forks before SegWit — including BIP 66, BIP 65, and the BIP 68 / 112 / 113 bundle — and note that imperfect activations (miners signaling without actually enforcing) caused short chain splits until the network converged.
SegWit activation politics led to BIP 148 (UASF) as a user-driven pressure mechanism — controversial because it risked consensus divergence if miners did not cooperate.
Sources: raw/Books/vojna-za-razmer-bloka/glava-5.md, raw/Books/vojna-za-razmer-bloka/glava-17.md
Relation to forks
Soft forks are often specified and deployed with BIPs; hard forks may also be proposed as implementations (e.g. BIP 101 / Bitcoin XT era), but require every participant to upgrade for a single chain — otherwise two assets emerge.
See forks and governance.
Sources
Related Terms
Glossary | governance | forks | SegWit | Taproot
Related Pages
- governance — who accepts rule changes
- forks — soft vs hard forks
- blocksize-war — political context of BIP debates
- segwit — major BIP-era upgrade
- taproot — later soft fork bundle