Introduction

Welcome to the Bitcoin Book of BIPs. This is a reading copy of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals that actually shape Bitcoin today — the deployed and complete documents, grouped by theme instead of by number.

I did not write the BIPs. The authors and contributors of bitcoin/bips did. My job here is to collect their work, skip the closed and withdrawn proposals so the book stays readable, and put related documents next to each other so the connections are easier to see.

Each chapter starts with a short note from me, then the BIP texts themselves. Those texts are the originals. If you want to propose a change, take it upstream. If you want to understand how wallets, nodes, miners, and consensus rules fit together, this order should help.

Thanks for picking this up. I hope it makes the archive feel more like a book and less like a numbered attic.