BIP Draft: Consensus Change Readiness Standard

[asaffulks]

This PR adds a new Informational BIP, Consensus Change Readiness Standard (bip-consensus-change-readiness-standard.md).

Summary. The BIP defines a voluntary readiness standard for scheduled consensus-change proposals: submission requirements, risk-tiered minimum review periods, code-audit requirements, activation-threshold floors, a published chain-split risk assessment, sunset requirements, and a 20-criterion readiness checklist that classifies a proposal Green / Yellow / Orange / Red. The standard is advisory — it binds no one, mandates nothing, and confers no authority to block a change; each node operator decides independently what to run. A completed scorecard's only force is the strength of the reasons it documents. The document sits within the repository's remit as BIP 3 describes it (processes, guidelines, best practices, and incident reports), and a reference implementation of the checklist (an interactive scorecard) is linked from the document.

Discussion record. BIP 3 prescribes the Bitcoin Development Mailing List as the ideation venue, and opening that thread has been in progress since mid-July:

• 2026-07-13 — Submitted the proposal as a new thread to the mailing list (bitcoindev@googlegroups.com), titled "A readiness standard for consensus changes: chain-split math and a scorecard." As a first post from a new member it entered the group's moderation queue, where it remains as of this filing. No rejection notice has been received.
• 2026-07-19 — Sent a brief status inquiry to the group's owner address (bitcoindev+owner@googlegroups.com); it was returned automatically because the group does not accept mail to owners or managers, and the group's contact-owners web form is not enabled. A copy addressed to the list itself joined the same moderation queue.

The proposal text has been public on this branch since 2026-07-12. I will add the Discussion header pointing to the mailing-list thread the moment it appears publicly, and in the meantime I welcome discussion here on the PR.

[murchandamus]

I’m sorry to hear that your mailing list submission was not forwarded. I assume this is based on the draft I saw a while ago.

My backlog is currently somewhat longer than usual, but I added your submission to my review list.

[asaffulks]

Thanks Murch — yes, same standard you looked at back in May, adapted from Chapter 3 into BIP format. It's been through several revisions since, a few of them from your notes. The list post went in July 13 and has sat in the new-member queue since — never rejected, just never reviewed — so I filed the PR with the dated record instead. If a live list thread is the right next step I'm happy to resubmit it, and I'll add the Discussion header the moment a thread exists.

[jonatack]

According to one of the mail list moderators, you should have received the following message:

"Upon cursory inspection, this submission appears to have a significant amount of LLM generated text combined with the request for human review, with few signs of prior inquiry whether this particular approach was even of interest to the community. This has been a recurring problematic pattern in submission to the list. Review has always been the bottleneck, not the generation of ideas. Working out all the details prior to establishing whether there is interest is counter-productive. LLMs exacerbate the issue. We understand this may be disappointing, and can certainly imagine this may all be well-intentioned, but we hope you can also see our end as well. Of course you are always free to publish and seek review elsewhere. Thank you for your time."

Perhaps submit a short, high quality, well considered, human written presentation of your idea to the mail list?

[asaffulks]

Thanks Jon — that message never reached me; your comment is the first I've seen of it, so thank you for relaying it.

Point taken on the sequencing. I've converted this to a draft and will take a short write-up of the idea to the list. For what it's worth, the idea didn't come out of nowhere — writing it up as an informational BIP was Jameson Lopp's suggestion after he read the paper, and Murch saw an early draft in May. But understood that interest gets established on the list, not in a PR.