bips

Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, known as BIPs, are formal written specifications for proposed changes to the Bitcoin protocol. This repository is the official archive where all BIPs are published, tracked, and stored. It serves as the community's central record of both accepted and rejected proposals going back to the early days of Bitcoin.

Anyone wanting to propose a change to Bitcoin starts by discussing the idea on the bitcoindev mailing list to gather feedback. If the idea has enough substance, they write it up as a formal BIP document following a specific format. A BIP editor reviews it for completeness and assigns it a number, then publishes it here by merging the pull request. Being published in this repository signals that a proposal meets basic editorial standards, not that the community has agreed to adopt it.

The main index in this repository lists every BIP by number, the layer of Bitcoin it affects (applications, consensus changes, peer services, or API/RPC), the title, the author or authors, the type (informational, specification, or process), and its current status. Statuses include Draft, Deployed, Closed, and Complete. Green in the index means the proposal has been deployed to the Bitcoin network; red means it was closed or rejected; yellow means it is complete but not yet broadly deployed.

Some of the most significant BIPs cover topics like Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP 32), the 12-word mnemonic seed phrase standard (BIP 39), Segregated Witness (BIP 141), Schnorr signatures (BIP 340), Taproot (BIP 341), and the Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction format (BIP 174). These are the technical standards that Bitcoin wallets, exchanges, and developers build on top of.

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