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

From: Martin Sustrik <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:20:44 +0200

On 22/10/13 09:56, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Martin Sustrik <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> There's also Security Considerations part in
>> every RFC that is pretty relevant for Bitcoin.
>
> Which would say something interesting like "If the bitcoin network
> implements inconsistent behavior in the consensus critical parts of
> the protocol the world ends. As such, conformance or _non_-conformance
> with this specification (in particular, sections 4. 5. and 6.) may be
> required for security."

In fact, yes.

In the end it boils down to saying something like: "Bitcoin is a unique 
global distributed application and thus all implementations MUST support 
the version of the protocol currently in use, irrespective of whether it 
have been documented and/or published. This RFC is meant only for 
informational purposes and is a snapshot of the protocol as to Oct 22nd 
2013."

That being said, I understand the idea of not publishing the spec so 
that everyone is forced to work with live data.

> A Bitcoin protocol RFC would be a great place to exercise RFC 6919
> keywords.  ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6919 )

Heh. Haven't seen that one.

Martin