<pre>
  BIP: x
  Title: BIP Status and Comments
  Status: Draft
  Type: Process
  Created: 2016-02-01
</pre>

==Abstract==

BIP 1 defines an ambiguous criteria for the Status field of BIPs, which is often a source of confusion.
Additionally, some BIPs have been adopted which are deemed unadvisable or unsafe by experts in the field, and there is no indication of this at present.
Finally, BIP 1 only allows a single copyright license generally considered deprecated, or publication under the public domain (which is not legally recognised in all jurisdictions).
This BIP intends to address these problems by more specifically defining the Status field, recommending a forum for people to comment on BIPs, and expanding the list of allowable BIP licenses.

==Copyright==

This BIP is dual-licensed under the Open Publication License and BSD 2-clause license.

==Specification==

===BIP status field===

Champions of a BIP may decide on their own to change the status between Draft, Deferred, or Withdrawn.

A BIP may only change status from Draft (or Rejected) to Accepted, when the author deems it is complete, has a working implementation (where applicable), and has community plans to progress it to the Final status.

BIPs should be changed from Draft or Accepted status, to Rejected status, upon request by any person, if they have not made progress in three years. Such a BIP may be changed to Draft status if the champion provides revisions that meaningfully address public criticism of the proposal, or to Accepted status if it meets the criteria required as described in the previous paragraph.

An Accepted BIP may progress to Final only when specific criteria reflecting real-world adoption has occurred. This is different for each BIP depending on the nature of its proposed changes, which will be expanded on below. Evaluation of this status change should be objectively verifiable, and/or be discussed on the development mailing list.

When a Final BIP is no longer relevant, its status may be changed to Replaced or Obsolete (which is equivalent to Replaced). This change must also be objectively verifiable and/or discussed.

A process BIP may change status from Draft to Active when it achieves consensus on the mailing list.

====Progression to Final status====

See [[bip-0123.mediawiki|BIP 123]] for definitions of the various BIP layers. Activation of this BIP implies activation of BIP 123.

A soft-fork BIP strictly requires a clear miner majority expressed by blockchain voting (eg, using BIP 9), as well as not meeting the inverse criteria for a hard-fork BIP (that is, economic consensus may reject a soft-fork BIP despite miner adoption). Because of the possibility of changes to miner dynamics, especially in light of delegated voting (mining pools), it is highly recommended that a supermajority vote around 95% be required by the BIP itself, unless rationale is given for a lower threshold.

A hard-fork BIP requires consensus from the entire Bitcoin economy, particularly including those selling desirable goods and services in exchange for bitcoin payments, as well as Bitcoin holders who wish to spend or would spend their bitcoins (including selling for other currencies) differently in the event of such a hard-fork. Consensus must be expressed by de facto usage of the hard-fork in practice (ie, not merely expressing public support, although that is a good step to establish pre-Final status consensus to adopt a BIP). This consensus cannot be reached merely by a super-majority, except by literally forcing the minority to accept the hard-fork (whether this is viable or not is outside the scope of this document).

Peer services BIPs should be observed to be adopted by at least 1% of public listening nodes for one month.

API/RPC and application layer BIPs must be implemented by at least two independent and compatible software applications.

Software authors are encouraged to publish summaries of what BIPs their software supports to aid in verification of status changes. Good examples of this at the time of writing this BIP, can be observed in [https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/bips.md Bitcoin Core's doc/bips.md file] as well as [https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet/blob/master/wallet/README.specs Bitcoin Wallet for Android's wallet/README.specs file].

====Formally defining consensus====

A proposal is said to have achieved consensus if it has been open to discussion in applicable forums for communication for at least one month, and has not maintained any substantiated objection by any person. Should objections to be made on a strictly obstructive basis, those obstructing may be ignored/overruled by agreement that they are merely being obstructive from all other persons involved in the discussion.

===BIP comments===

Each BIP should, in its preamble, link to a Bitcoin Wiki page with a summary tone of the comments on that page.

Pages must be named after the full BIP number (eg, "BIP 0001") and placed in the "BIP Comments" namespace. For example, the link for BIP 1 will be https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_Comments:BIP_0001 .

Summary tones may be chosen from the following, but this BIP does not intend to cover all possible nuances:

* Unanimously Recommended for implementation
* Unanimously Discourage for implementation
* Mostly Recommended for implementation, with some Discouragement
* Mostly Discouraged for implementation, with some Recommendation

To avoid doubt: comments and status are unrelated metrics to judge a BIP, and neither should be directly influencing the other.

===BIP licensing===

New BIPs may be accepted with the following licenses:

====Recommended licenses====

* [https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause OSI-approved BSD 2-clause license]
* [https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause OSI-approved BSD 3-clause license]
* [https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal]
* [http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/License-Notices-for-Other-Files.html GNU All-Permissive License]

====Not recommented, but acceptable licenses====

* [http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Apache License, version 2.0]
* [http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt Boost Software License, version 1.0]
* [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International]
* [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International]
* [https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT Expat/MIT/X11 license]
* [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), version 3 or newer]
* [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html GNU Free Documentation License]
* [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or newer]
* [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1 or newer]
* [http://opencontent.org/openpub/ Open Publication License, version 1.0]

==See Also==

* [[bip-0001.mediawiki|BIP 1: BIP Purpose and Guidelines]]
* [[bip-0123.mediawiki|BIP 123: BIP Classification]]
