Motion to Activate BIP 3

[Murch]

Dear list,

After planned work on BIP 3⁰ finished in February, BIP 3 was advanced to
Proposed in March 2025¹. A few minor adjustments were made to BIP 3
since then (see below). I have since April maintained a pull request
that would activate BIP 3: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1820.

At this point, BIP 3 has received over 600 comments on GitHub and has
been discussed in multiple threads on this list. The proposal has been
Proposed for over seven months, and while several minor improvements
were proposed and processed, the proposal has no unaddressed objections
stated here or on the activation pull request. A growing list of people
has expressed explicit support for activating BIP 3 by leaving an ACK on
the pull request after reviewing the BIP:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1820#issue-2990155954

I formally propose a motion to adopt BIP 3 to replace BIP 2 as our BIPs
Process.

Since BIP 2 doesn’t specify a procedure for activating Process BIPs, I
suggest that people who wish to state their support leave an ACK on
#1820 or reply in this thread. Similarly, I would like to invite anyone
to state concerns or raise objections here or on #1820.
While BIP 3 has long been proposed and the activation PR has been open
for over half a year, I suggest that we give all would-be reviewers
another four weeks, until 2025-12-02, before evaluating whether there is
rough consensus for merging the activation pull request. This should be
ample time to review and discuss BIP 3 as well as the activation PR,
even for people that have so far not engaged with the material.

Best,
Murch

----

Summary of changes since BIP 3 was advanced to Proposed:

- The License header now uses SPDX License Expressions²
- The License-Code header was dropped in favor of requiring that the
license terms of the auxiliary files be specified in the respective
directory or folder per a license header or LICENSE file²
- The “Created” header has been renamed to “Assigned”³
- The BIP text has been improved to clarify:
  - the purpose of the BIPs repository⁴
  - that authors should establish viability of their proposal on the
mailing list⁴
  - the distinction between publication, acceptance, and adoption of
proposals⁴
  - when Draft BIPs can be closed due to not making progress⁴
  - that BIPs submissions may not be generated by AI/LLM⁵

⁰ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0003.md
¹ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1794
² https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1892
³ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1970
⁴ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1819
⁵ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2006

[Ruben Somsen]

Murch, you did an excellent job writing this and taking everyone's feedback into account. I think it's a crystal clear step up and should be adopted.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Cheers,

Ruben

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