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BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)

Also called: BIP, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, BIPs, bitcoin bip.

A BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) is a numbered design document that proposes a new feature, standard or process for Bitcoin.

A BIP, short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, is a design document that describes a new feature, standard or process for Bitcoin, along with the reasoning behind it. Each one gets a number, so "BIP 32" or "BIP 341" means exactly the same text to everyone.

How the BIP process works

Anyone can write a BIP. Ideas are discussed on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and submitted to the bitcoin/bips repository on GitHub, where the BIP editors assign numbers and check formatting. The rules themselves are BIPs: BIP 1 (Amir Taaki, 2011) defined the first process, BIP 2 (Luke Dashjr, 2016) revised it, and BIP 3 (Murch, 2025) replaced it with a simpler workflow (see BIP 2 vs BIP 3).

Under BIP 3 every proposal has one of three types: Specification (rules that can be implemented, such as an address format), Informational (guidelines or design notes) or Process (how things around Bitcoin are run). Its status moves through Draft, Complete, Deployed and Closed.

What a BIP is not

Publishing a BIP does not change Bitcoin. BIP 3 describes each BIP as its authors' recommendation: some are never adopted, some are adopted by wallets or other software, and a few change the consensus rules through a soft fork that the network's nodes choose to enforce, as SegWit and Taproot did.

Many everyday wallet standards are BIPs too, such as seed phrases (BIP 39) and derivation paths (BIP 44). Start with What is a BIP?, see the most important BIPs, or browse every deployed BIP.

BIPs that define BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)

  • BIP 3: Updated BIP Process: Deployed. Replaces BIP 2 with a streamlined set of rules for preparing, submitting and publishing proposals, including the role of the editors who manage them. It keeps the process workable as the number of…
  • BIP 2: BIP process, revised: Closed. A revised version of the proposal process that replaced BIP 1, clarifying how proposals move between statuses, how comments are gathered, and which licenses are allowed. It aimed to make the path…
  • BIP 1: BIP Purpose and Guidelines: Closed. The original document that defined what a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal is and how one is written, discussed and accepted. Modeled on Python's proposal process, it gave the community a shared, public…

Related terms

  • Soft fork: A soft fork is a backward-compatible change to Bitcoin's consensus rules that only tightens them, so old nodes still accept the new blocks.
  • Consensus rules: Consensus rules are the checks every full node applies to decide whether a block or transaction is valid; a block that breaks one is rejected.
  • SegWit (Segregated Witness): SegWit (Segregated Witness) is the 2017 soft fork that moved signatures into a separate witness, fixing malleability and introducing block weight.
  • Taproot: Taproot is the 2021 Bitcoin soft fork (BIPs 340, 341, 342) that added Schnorr signatures and P2TR outputs which hide unused spending conditions.

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