From: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>
To: Olaoluwa Osuntokun <laolu32@gmail.com>,
Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Ordinals BIP PR
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:15:04 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <f6c909b3-6851-f26d-3b30-a65232c1cc61@dashjr.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAO3Pvs_uUtCfhayU=3LCtpNGtkcDr=H0AM65bhNJcTMuBzWn_w@mail.gmail.com>
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Seems like a "solution" looking for a problem which doesn't actually
exist. And not even a good "solution" for that - might as well not have
BIP number at all, if they're not going to be usefully assigned. What we
have now is working fine aside from a few trolls once in a while.
On 10/24/23 18:56, Olaoluwa Osuntokun wrote:
> TL;DR: let's just use an automated system to assign BIP numbers, so we can
> spend time on more impactful things.
>
> IIUC, one the primary roles of the dedicated BIP maintainers is just
> to hand
> out BIP numbers for documents. Supposedly with this privilege, the BIP
> maintainer is able to tastefully assign related BIPs to consecutive
> numbers,
> and also reserve certain BIP number ranges for broad categories, like 3xx
> for p2p changes (just an example).
>
> To my knowledge, the methodology for such BIP number selection isn't
> published anywhere, and is mostly arbitrary. As motioned in this thread,
> some perceive this manual process as a gatekeeping mechanism, and often
> ascribe favoritism as the reason why PR X got a number immediately,
> but PR Y
> has waited N months w/o an answer.
>
> Every few years we go through an episode where someone is rightfully upset
> that they haven't been assigned a BIP number after following the requisite
> process. Most recently, another BIP maintainer was appointed, with
> the hope
> that the second maintainer would help to alleviate some of the subjective
> load of the position. Fast forward to this email thread, and it doesn't
> seem like adding more BIP maintainers will actually help with the issue of
> BIP number assignment.
>
> Instead, what if we just removed the subjective human element from the
> process, and switched to using PR numbers to assign BIPs? Now instead of
> attempting to track down a BIP maintainer at the end of a potentially
> involved review+iteration period, PRs are assigned BIP numbers as soon as
> they're opened and we have one less thing to bikeshed and gatekeep.
>
> One down side of this is that assuming the policy is adopted, we'll sorta
> sky rocket the BIP number space. At the time of writing of this email, the
> next PR number looks to be 1508. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me,
> but we could offset that by some value, starting at the highest currently
> manually assigned BIP number. BIP numbers would no longer always be
> contiguous, but that's sort of already the case.
>
> There's also the matter of related BIPs, like the segwit series (BIPs 141,
> 142, 143, 144, and 145). For these, we can use a suffix scheme to indicate
> the BIP lineage. So if BIP 141 was the first PR, then BIP 142 was opened
> later, the OP can declare the BIP 142 is BIP 141.2 or BIP 141-2. I don't
> think it would be too difficult to find a workable scheme.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -- Laolu
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 11:35 AM Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> Everything standardized between Bitcoin software is eligible to be
> and
> should be a BIP. I completely disagree with the claim that it's
> used for
> too many things.
>
> SLIPs exist for altcoin stuff. They shouldn't be used for things
> related
> to Bitcoin.
>
> BOLTs also shouldn't have ever been a separate process and should
> really
> just get merged into BIPs. But at this point, that will probably take
> quite a bit of effort, and obviously cooperation and active
> involvement
> from the Lightning development community.
>
> Maybe we need a 3rd BIP editor. Both Kalle and myself haven't had
> time
> to keep up. There are several PRs far more important than Ordinals
> nonsense that need to be triaged and probably merged.
>
> The issue with Ordinals is that it is actually unclear if it's
> eligible
> to be a BIP at all, since it is an attack on Bitcoin rather than a
> proposed improvement. There is a debate on the PR whether the
> "technically unsound, ..., or not in keeping with the Bitcoin
> philosophy." or "must represent a net improvement." clauses (BIP
> 2) are
> relevant. Those issues need to be resolved somehow before it could be
> merged. I have already commented to this effect and given my own
> opinions on the PR, and simply pretending the issues don't exist
> won't
> make them go away. (Nor is it worth the time of honest people to help
> Casey resolve this just so he can further try to harm/destroy
> Bitcoin.)
>
> Luke
>
>
> On 10/23/23 13:43, Andrew Poelstra via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 03:35:30PM +0000, Peter Todd via
> bitcoin-dev wrote:
> >> I have _not_ requested a BIP for OpenTimestamps, even though it
> is of much
> >> wider relevance to Bitcoin users than Ordinals by virtue of the
> fact that much
> >> of the commonly used software, including Bitcoin Core, is
> timestamped with OTS.
> >> I have not, because there is no need to document every single
> little protocol
> >> that happens to use Bitcoin with a BIP.
> >>
> >> Frankly we've been using BIPs for too many things. There is no
> avoiding the act
> >> that BIP assignment and acceptance is a mark of approval for a
> protocol. Thus
> >> we should limit BIP assignment to the minimum possible:
> _extremely_ widespread
> >> standards used by the _entire_ Bitcoin community, for the core
> mission of
> >> Bitcoin.
> >>
> > This would eliminate most wallet-related protocols e.g. BIP69
> (sorted
> > keys), ypubs, zpubs, etc. I don't particularly like any of those
> but if
> > they can't be BIPs then they'd need to find another spec repository
> > where they wouldn't be lost and where updates could be tracked.
> >
> > The SLIP repo could serve this purpose, and I think e.g. SLIP39
> is not a BIP
> > in part because of perceived friction and exclusivity of the
> BIPs repo.
> > But I'm not thrilled with this situation.
> >
> > In fact, I would prefer that OpenTimestamps were a BIP :).
> >
> >> It's notable that Lightning is _not_ standardized via the BIP
> process. I think
> >> that's a good thing. While it's arguably of wide enough use to
> warrent BIPs,
> >> Lightning doesn't need the approval of Core maintainers, and
> using their
> >> separate BOLT process makes that clear.
> >>
> > Well, LN is a bit special because it's so big that it can have
> its own
> > spec repo which is actively maintained and used.
> >
> > While it's technically true that BIPs need "approval of Core
> maintainers"
> > to be merged, the text of BIP2 suggests that this approval
> should be a
> > functionary role and be pretty-much automatic. And not require
> the BIP
> > be relevant or interesting or desireable to Core developers.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > bitcoin-dev mailing list
> > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-10-25 0:15 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-10-21 5:38 [bitcoin-dev] Ordinals BIP PR Casey Rodarmor
2023-10-23 13:45 ` Andrew Poelstra
2023-10-23 15:35 ` Peter Todd
2023-10-23 16:32 ` Tim Ruffing
2023-10-26 22:05 ` Peter Todd
2023-10-23 17:43 ` Andrew Poelstra
2023-10-23 18:29 ` Luke Dashjr
2023-10-24 1:28 ` alicexbt
2023-10-24 22:56 ` Olaoluwa Osuntokun
2023-10-24 23:08 ` Christopher Allen
2023-10-25 0:15 ` Luke Dashjr [this message]
2023-10-26 22:11 ` Peter Todd
2023-10-27 9:39 ` Alexander F. Moser
2023-10-27 17:05 ` alicexbt
2023-11-09 2:15 ` Casey Rodarmor
2023-11-09 22:32 ` Claus Ehrenberg
2023-10-23 14:57 Léo Haf
2023-10-23 17:26 ` Ryan Breen
2023-11-20 22:20 vjudeu
2023-11-21 12:13 ` Kostas Karasavvas
2023-11-21 23:10 vjudeu
2023-11-22 11:27 ` Kostas Karasavvas
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