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

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:40:39 -0400

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 09:38:31AM +0200, Martin Sustrik wrote:
> On 22/10/13 16:08, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > All that is good practice, but we should avoid adding burdensome
> > process that might discourage BIP writing.
> >
> > Consider a distributed approach:  if you feel a draft needs more
> > sections or better language, submit a pull request yourself and help
> > community-edit the document.
> 
> I would love to do so.
> 
> However, from what Peter Todd said above, my feeling was that spec is 
> deliberately vague to force compatibility with the reference 
> implementation rather than with a document.
> 
> While that kind of compatibility-via-obscurity won't probably work in a 
> long run, in short run it can prevent proliferation of implementations 
> and thus give protocol more space and flexibility to evolve (I've done 
> the same trick with ZeroMQ myself once).

The reference implementation is the specification - the "specification"
on the wiki is best thought of as a set of Coles Notes on the real
specification. If you don't already understand that and the nuance of
that statement you should assume the protocol is fixed in stone and
doesn't evolve at all; that statement is not quite true, but it's very
close to the truth.

I gotta get around to writing a "Developers" section for the FAQ
explaining this stuff....

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
0000000000000007362b283ac07839aba795dbfb3c5c4e831d80df9cf3bea2d5