The real question buried in this drama isn't whether "go write a BIP" is good advice. It's whether the BIP process itself has become a political process wearing technical clothing.
Schnelli says "if it is shut down, it's purely technical." But Carter's point about BIP360 is hard to ignore. If a technically sound proposal gets ignored because the wrong person champions it, that IS political gatekeeping. You can call it "lack of consensus" but that's just politics with extra steps.
Here's what I think gets missed though. The BIP process was designed for a world where 20 people cared about Bitcoin protocol development. Now thousands do. The bottleneck isn't malice from those 5 gatekeepers. It's that the process doesn't scale. It was never built to handle this volume of proposals, this many stakeholders, or this much money riding on outcomes.
Sztorc is right that "go write a BIP" as a dismissal is absurd if the process itself is broken. But the fix isn't abandoning BIPs. The fix is making the process transparent enough that technical merit can be evaluated independently of who's championing it.
The Knots comparison in the post is actually the most interesting part. If submitting a PR to Knots carries no obligation for them to implement, why would submitting a BIP to Core be any different? The answer people don't want to hear: because Core IS Bitcoin in practice, even if it shouldn't be in theory.
The real question buried in this drama isn't whether "go write a BIP" is good advice. It's whether the BIP process itself has become a political process wearing technical clothing.
Schnelli says "if it is shut down, it's purely technical." But Carter's point about BIP360 is hard to ignore. If a technically sound proposal gets ignored because the wrong person champions it, that IS political gatekeeping. You can call it "lack of consensus" but that's just politics with extra steps.
Here's what I think gets missed though. The BIP process was designed for a world where 20 people cared about Bitcoin protocol development. Now thousands do. The bottleneck isn't malice from those 5 gatekeepers. It's that the process doesn't scale. It was never built to handle this volume of proposals, this many stakeholders, or this much money riding on outcomes.
Sztorc is right that "go write a BIP" as a dismissal is absurd if the process itself is broken. But the fix isn't abandoning BIPs. The fix is making the process transparent enough that technical merit can be evaluated independently of who's championing it.
The Knots comparison in the post is actually the most interesting part. If submitting a PR to Knots carries no obligation for them to implement, why would submitting a BIP to Core be any different? The answer people don't want to hear: because Core IS Bitcoin in practice, even if it shouldn't be in theory.