A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a design document for introducing features or information to Bitcoin. This is the standard way of communicating ideas since Bitcoin has no formal structure.

The first BIP (BIP 0001) was submitted by Amir Taaki on 2011-08-19 and described what a BIP is.

Types

There are three types of BIPs:

Standards Track BIPs - Changes to the network protocol, block or transaction validation, or anything affecting interoperability.

- Changes to the network protocol, block or transaction validation, or anything affecting interoperability. Informational BIPs - Design issues, general guidelines. This type of BIP is NOT for proposing new features and do not represent community consensus

- Design issues, general guidelines. This type of BIP is NOT for proposing new features and do not represent community consensus Process BIPs - Describes or proposes a change in process. Similar to Standards BIPs but apply outside the Bitcoin protocol.

Layers

BIP 0123 established four layers for Standards BIPs:

Consensus[1] Peer Services API/RPC Applications

Workflow

As described in BIP 0001 the workflow of a BIP is as follows:

List of BIPs

Please do not modify this page. This is a mirror of the BIP from the source Git repository here.



Notes

↑ Further divided into hard and softforks