Bitcoin is one of those coins which are highly looked up onto the web. Unlike alt coins which are looked secondary after bitcoin, there is a heavy burden for ethereum and bitcoin to handle when it comes to making changes to their chain.
Ethereum has a foundation which kind of does the centralized changes and rolls it over to the nodes which gets accepted and then later even moved to layer 2 for the respective common layer 1 changes. Bitcoin on the other hand does not have central change authority, so it depends on community input, proposal and then pushing changes through variety of way.
So today I thought why not cover this topic as it is often not looked up by the average consumer. And if I can give less technical view of such system of bitcoin that would help the newbies and the average consumer to know bitcoin ecosystem in a better way.
Let's talk about BIP and how it works and what it can do.
What is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)?
Let's dumb it down the concept in such a way that we would be able to get the BIP proposal in a lot better way. BIP is a proposal system where a change is researched, proposed and then put into the community review. Once the change is accepted it can move further into the next step where it can be developed and deployed.
Each of such proposals go through variety of the small changes and those changes are community approved. This way you know the blame does not get into only one person and it gets into various types of the stages and it gets approved, it has types of proposals like standard, informational and process. This way the BIP proposal is managed by the community. You can read about one such proposal here.
How does the BIP process works?
BIP proposal goes through various stages and we can explain them in short so you can get an idea on how to work with the BIP process. Let's talk about the phases.
- In first phase the drafts are made, where your draft is going to contain proposal and how it would be implemented and deployed.
- Community discussion goes on about the draft and it has to be approved in this phase before it can move to next for the further discussion.
- Any changes and the updates that are meant to change in the proposal are done in this 3rd phase and then it moves further.
- After the discussion and changes there is a formalization process which kind of makes it easier to digest.
- In the next few phases you have implementation and the deployment, so that you get the proposal actions.
- FInally the proposal is monitored on how the deployment worked and how the changes were merged and processed by the chain.
As you can get an idea that this process may appear complex. Though it's easy to understand but the community and the people who work on those changes take a lot of time to push them. And now the agencies, big business, and even govt based people are involved in such DeFi discussions and the proposals are passed that way.
Why these proposals matter?
We as a consumer don't care how the DeFi and chain works. But there are too many people who work and stay under stress to pass these changes. And so such proposals make sure that there is no manipulation by the dictators and the people who are manipulating the govt don't get into the chain business directly. Hence having proposals and the process matters to keep the bad elements away.
Most of the Linux, Open source and also the blockchain communities these days make use of the proposals and the community votes to pass the changes. And such proposals also get funded by the corporate but often that means they get a chance to participate in the network as a voter too. Which may always may not work in favor of the token but it's better to have such system.
Most of the blockchains have a lot of complex process running in the background and for it to have any simplicity and modularity, it goes through the proposal system. Bitcoin has it in the form of BIP.