Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Revisiting the BIPS process, a proposal

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 03:49:41 -0400

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:34:57AM +0200, Martin Sustrik wrote:
> On 22/10/13 09:03, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:59 PM, Jean-Paul Kogelman
> > <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >> Have you seen: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification ?
> >
> > Take care, the information in the wiki is woefully incomplete.
> 
> Imagine myself, with no prior knowledge of Bitcoin looking at the 
> document. It starts with "Hashes". What hashes? No idea what's going on. 
> Etc.
> 
> Now compare that to a well written RFC. It starts with introduction, 
> description of the problem, explains the conceptual model of the 
> solution, then dives into the details. There's also Security 
> Considerations part in every RFC that is pretty relevant for Bitcoin.
> 
> As I said, I am willing to help with writing such document, it would be 
> a nice way of learning the stuff, however, help from core devs, such as 
> answering question that may arise in the process, or reviewing the 
> document would be needed.

Writing such RFCs is dangerous due to the consensus nature of Bitcoin -
it makes people think the standard is the RFC, rather than the code.

I hear one of the better intros to Bitcoin is the Khan academy videos,
but I've never watched them myself. Once you understand how it works,
start reading source code - the Bitcoin codebase is actually really
simple and readable. However remember that the implications of that
codebase are anything but simple; there's lots of reasons to think
Satoshi himself didn't understand Bitcoin all that well, even by the
time he left the project.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
000000000000000f155e7a648e84a83589048ae1cacb0c60bfce2437553b6af4