Bitcoin: Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs)

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Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a design document for introducing features or information to Bitcoin. ... This is the standard way of communicating ideas since Bitcoin has no formal structure. The first BIP (BIP 0001) was submitted by Amir Taaki on 2011-08-19 and described what a BIP is. Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) Source: Bitycoin list of BIPs

Final BIPs

The following non-forking BIPs have been finalized.

Forking BIPs

There are three kinds of forks: Temporary 1) Temporary forks are forks that occur when miners, on cryptocurrency systems, discover a block at the same time. This results in two split competing blockchains. Temporary forks are resolved in proof-of-work systems such as Bitcoin when miners select which chain to form subsequent blocks upon. The longest blockchain is viewed as being the ‘true’ blockchain, and will win out, whilst the shorter chain will be abandoned. , Soft 2) A soft fork is a backward compatible method of upgrading a blockchain. In other words, a soft fork is software upgrade that is backward compatible with previous versions of the software. Soft forks do not require nodes on the network to upgrade to maintain consensus, because all blocks on the soft-forked blockchain follow the old set of consensus rules as well as the new ones. Blockchain Soft Fork & Hard Fork Explained , and Hard3) A hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of a blockchain; a new set of consensus rules are introduced into the network that is not compatible with the older network. In other words, a hard fork can be thought of as a software upgrade that is not compatible with previous versions of the software. All network participants are required to upgrade to the latest version of the software in order to continue verifying and validating new blocks of transactions. .

The following forking BIPs have been finalized.