BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)

Anyone can draft a BIP, but turning an idea into an actual network change requires broad agreement among developers, node operators, and miners, since no single company or foundation controls Bitcoin. Proposals are submitted as pull requests to the public bitcoin/bips repository, where a BIP editor checks that the document is on-topic and properly formatted before assigning it a number, after which discussion moves to developer mailing lists until rough consensus forms or the idea is abandoned.

BIPs fall into three categories. Standards Track (now often called Specification) proposals change the protocol itself, such as consensus rules or peer-to-peer messaging. Informational BIPs offer guidance or document design rationale without requiring adoption. Process BIPs describe or change the procedures around Bitcoin development, including the BIP system itself. In 2025, developers activated BIP 3, the first overhaul of that process in nine years, replacing an old nine-status lifecycle with four simpler stages: Draft, Complete, Deployed, and Closed.

Some BIPs have reshaped Bitcoin in practice. BIP 32 defined hierarchical deterministic wallets, BIP 39 standardized the recovery seed phrases used with them, and BIP 141 introduced Segregated Witness, restructuring transaction data to fix malleability and free up block space for more transactions. The 2021 Taproot upgrade bundled three BIPs (340, 341, 342) to add Schnorr signatures and more flexible, private spending conditions.

Because Bitcoin has no central issuer, BIPs remain voluntary specifications, not enforced upgrades, a governance model later echoed by Ethereum's own Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) process.