The Bitcoin Core team is looking to refresh the process by which code changes are proposed, considered and implemented in a bid to engage more people in the development of the protocol. But this remains a significant challenge in a diverse and distributed community.
The current process goes like this: If a community member has an idea for an update, he or she proposes it to the group by sending a description through a public mailing list. If enough people think the update is worth deploying, a Bitcoin Improvement Process ( BIP ) document is created and posted to the bitcoin GitHub. That document can then be commented on further by the community.
Once the document has "rough consensus" – defined as the general sense that everyone more or less is on board with the idea – it gets merged into the reference client, although it’s still pending review at that point.
"One of the requirements for a BIP is there needs to be an implementation for it," said Eric Lombrozo, chief technology officer at Ciphrex and Bitcoin Core spokesperson.
He added: "Someone can’t just say I would love this new feature. They must demonstrate that it works and can be done." Democratizing access
This process can be rather hectic since every step is public. Plus, people are regularly introducing ideas that are at differing levels of abstraction. For instance, some proposals would require full support from the network while others aren’t mandatory. Others would require changing the code entirely.
If the proposal will change consensus rules, or how the network validates blocks on its distributed ledger, it undergoes quite a bit of review. There have been several of these soft forks, and many of them have not been particularly controversial.
For instance, BIP 65 added a new feature to the codebase which allows users […]
