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.
>
>
>
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