Bitcoin’s open source development is an often heralded strength, a show of the network’s resiliency and difficulty to capture. But take a closer look, and anything as complex as developing, updating and patching up a blockchain in real time often has its challenges.
“The problem was that Luke was the only BIP editor, which means that he's the only person who could merge anything into the BIP repository,” Chow told CoinDesk in an interview. “This ranges from almost no effort to a lot of effort, and it just ended up being that Luke didn't have time for this.” “One of the big frustrations is that Luke would comment, like, hey, you need to fix this thing, and the author will fix it in like a few hours. But then we wouldn’t see Luke again on that PR for another month or two. Which is really frustrating because like, well, I did exactly what you wanted me to do,” Chow, who has at least four open BIPs, explained.
"The BIPs repository records concrete ideas for reference. A comprehensive, specific description is indispensable for advancing the distributed conversation about a proposal. I hope that more people volunteering time to sight contributions to the BIPs repository will facilitate more efficient discussions about ideas," Murch, one of the new editors, told CoinDesk in an email.after a recommendation by AJ Towns, and by Bitcoin’s standards could be said to have gone rather smoothly.
Dashjr, for instance, is a known opponent of OP_CAT and Ordinals, and some saw him as unfairly standing in the way of approving their respective proposals.“As far as I am aware OP_CAT has not been assigned a BIP number,” BastionZero CTO Ethan Heilman, one of the proposal's co-authors, told CoinDesk in an email. “We could be assigned a BIP number at any point so this information may be out of date.