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

From: Martin Sustrik <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:03:14 +0200

On 23/10/13 23:07, Pieter Wuille wrote:

> In short,
> consistency is more important than correctness.

That's a nice and concise way to put it and any potential protocol 
documentation should start with a statement like that.

> However, I do not think that making it hard to find information about
> the details of the system is the way to go. Alternate implementations
> are likely inevitable, and in the long run probably a win for the
> ecosystem. If effort is put into accurately describing the rules, it
> should indeed carry a strong notice about it being descriptive rather
> than normative.

One interesting question is whather alternative implementations are more 
likely to get it wrong because the protocol description is wrong or 
because the authors misunderstood the reference implementation source code.

Extensive documentation of the source code, a la Knuth's literate 
programming, may be some kind of a middle ground.

> If someone is willing to work on that, I am (and likely many people in
> #bitcoin-dev are) available for any questions about the protocol and
> its semantics.

Ok. Several people expressed an interest in the topic, so I'll give it a 
try and see how it fares.

Martin