On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 11:28:49AM -0700, Murch wrote:
BIP3
already recommends that the Rationale should record relevant
objections or
important concerns that were raised and addressed as this proposal was
developed.
Right, I'm particularly referring to issues that aren't (sufficiently)
addressed here.
If it helps, consider the user story: "As a BIP author, if there's a
problem/concern with my (draft) BIP that I don't currently know how
to address (or perhaps don't currently have time to address), how
should I track that concern and ensure that it's known to potential
collaborators/implementers?"
My previous best answer for APO was "file an issue against
bitcoin-inquisition/bitcoin" which doesn't feel very satisfactory.
Open issues are also already often recorded in Draft BIPs.
Can you point to some examples? That sounds like a match for what I was
thinking. ("git grep -i open.issue" in the master branch has no hits,
afaics)
We now
allow linking to multiple relevant discussions—new threads should be
added
as a document matures. In an ideal world this would already cover at
least
the first two classes of feedback.
I think there probably should be a second space for issues that the
author disputes; that may happen due to the criticisms being invalid,
or the author being unreasonable -- having a third party being able to
make a "yeah, this is a reasonable thing for people to be aware of"
without compromising the "BIPs are owned by their authors" principle
would be valuable.
In principle I am open to the idea to collect a summary of the
discussion
and dissent in a dedicated space, but there was hardly any commentary
even
when anyone could post it without any friction.
From my perspective, the comments wiki wasn't valuable for either
summaries (it just contains random people's hot-takes on the topic) or
for discussion (there's not a wide range of people responding to issues).
So the friction there is just "reading/commenting is a complete waste
of time".
A list of open issues that the author agrees are worth paying
attention to
in their own BIP would be worth paying attention to, I think, except for
the "oh, the game theory optimal approach is to reject all open issues;
that way more people will think my BIP is perfect" flaw.
Why should we expect this
more arduous approach to have more adoption than the comment system? My
expectation would be that going via pull requests and curation would not
create more commentary, but the same amount of commentary would increase
work and decision making for the BIP Editors, especially if the
expectation
is that BIP Editors collect such feedback for BIPs when the authors or
dissenters do not submit it.
I think the purpose would be to summarise commentary, not generate it.
For
example, if you wanted to know "what are the concerns people have with
BIP 119 so I can judge them for myself", how would you get that answer?
Or, if you asked an AI, how would it generate a good answer? I think
the only real approach is to scour the archives of this list, delving,
optech, various pull requests, and maybe also IRC logs or twitter debates
or podcast or talk transcripts?
I think this would be a substantial improvement on the state of the art
for things like BIP 39 and its "Unanimously discourage for
implementation"
criticisms,[…]
This issue has already been addressed. When BIP3 was deployed, I
removed all
Comment URL headers that linked to empty wikis, and only left those
that had
content. BIP3 empowers¹ BIP Owners to decide whether to remove or keep
Comment Summary and Comment URL from their BIPs. To be fair, this
information may need to be spread more broadly.
Hmm, filed as https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2184 maybe.
[…] or, eg, creating issues against bitcoin-inquisition/bitcoin [0],
or commenting on old, closed PRs [1].
The latter was my mistake. I should have just emailed BIP authors
directly
instead of commenting on the ancient PRs that submitted the
corresponding
documents, or opened up a PR to propose the changes to get the authors’
input on them.
That wasn't meant as a criticism; just trying to figure out something
better to do in future.
Cheers,
aj
