Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)

Formally, a BIP is a design document that gives the Bitcoin community a concrete way to propose, discuss, and record changes to the protocol, its reference software, or the processes around it, since no company or foundation can unilaterally decide what ships next on Bitcoin.

The process starts socially rather than technically: an author raises an idea on the Bitcoin developer mailing list to gauge interest before drafting anything formal. Only once a proposal is well specified, on topic, and has generated genuine public discussion does a volunteer BIP editor assign it a number and merge it into the public bips repository on GitHub. Editors check formatting and scope, not technical merit; whether an idea is actually good is settled through open debate among developers, node operators, and miners, not a vote. A BIP moves from Draft to Complete once its authors judge it finished, and to Deployed once the change is actually live on the network. In 2025 the workflow itself was overhauled under BIP 3, replacing a confusing nine-status system with a simpler Draft, Complete, Deployed, and Closed lifecycle.

BIPs fall into three categories: Standards Track proposals that alter consensus rules or network behavior, Informational BIPs offering design guidance without requiring adoption, and Process BIPs that change how development itself is organized. Landmark examples include BIP 32 for hierarchical deterministic wallets, BIP 39 for recovery seed phrases, BIP 141 for Segregated Witness, and BIP 340 through 342 for the 2021 Taproot upgrade. Because adoption depends on rough consensus rather than central approval, most BIPs, including many soft fork proposals, never move past the draft stage.