BIPs Status Movement
What moved in the BIPs repository
| BIP | Status change | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| BIP-54 | to COMPLETE | Consensus Cleanup soft-fork spec - timewarp, max validation time, Merkle weaknesses, duplicate-tx fix |
| BIP-38 | to DEPLOYED | Passphrase-encrypted private key format for paper wallets and physical bitcoins |
| BIP-78 | to DEPLOYED | "A Simple Payjoin Proposal" - sender and receiver both contribute inputs |
| BIP-176 | to COMPLETE | "bits" denomination: 1 bit = 100 sats = 1/1,000,000 BTC |
| BIP-10 | CLOSED | 2011 Alan Reiner proposal for multisig transaction distribution; superseded in practice by PSBT (BIP-174) |
| BIP-449 | ASSIGNED | OP_TWEAKADD - a new tapscript opcode for x-only key tweak addition |
| BIP 3 | DEPLOYED | Murch's revised BIP process - replaces BIP 2 with streamlined editor role |
BIP-54 - Consensus Cleanup
Soft fork fixing four long-standing vulnerabilities
WHAT IT FIXES
Originally proposed by Matt Corallo in 2019 and revived in spring 2024 with Antoine Poinsot. BIP-54 bundles four consensus fixes:
- Timewarp attack - a majority-hashrate attacker can manipulate block timestamps to drop difficulty to minimum within 38 days and steal subsidy from future miners.
- Worst-case block validation time - cap pathological scripts that take disproportionate CPU to verify.
- Merkle tree weaknesses - close the 64-byte transaction Merkle-collision class.
- Duplicate-transaction prevention - explicitly disallow re-mining the same txid (BIP-30 / BIP-34 cleanup).
TIMEWARP FIX
Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks. BIP-54 says the first block of each new period can't claim a timestamp earlier than the last block of the previous period, give or take two hours. That closes the window an attacking miner used to drift timestamps backwards and drop difficulty.
EDITS LANDED THIS WINDOW
Timewarp motivation wording, worst-case validation-time wording, BIP-34 rationale cleanup, Luke Dashjr's extranonce concern noted in rationale, and a rebased Bitcoin Core reference implementation link. Status: Complete. Tested on Bitcoin Inquisition signet.
BIP-449 - OP_TWEAKADD
Jeremy Rubin's proposed tapscript opcode
THE IDEA
When you build a Taproot address today, your wallet quietly combines a public key with extra commitments (like a hidden script tree). That combining step is called a "tweak": take a key
P, add a small amount t·G, get a tweaked key Q = P + t·G. OP_TWEAKADD exposes that same step inside Bitcoin Script - so a transaction can verify "this output key really is this base key plus that tweak" on-chain, without anyone revealing private keys.WHAT IT UNLOCKS
- Prove a tweak in script - reveal what was committed inside a Taproot key without spending it.
- Enforce signing order - require Alice to sign before Bob can sign.
- Delegate signing - hand spending power to another key in a verifiable way.
- Key evolution - let the spending key change over time without a heavy signature check.
- Covenant-like rules - lightweight restrictions on what a transaction can do.
WHO ELSE CARES
The PR's commit text flags compatibility work with Alpen Labs (a Bitcoin L2 / rollup project) and MATT (Merkleize All The Things, a family of covenant designs that builds expressive contracts out of repeated hashing). BIP-449 is Draft / Consensus soft fork; number assigned March 2026 via Rubin's 2025 PR #1944.
Deployed - BIP-38 and BIP-78
Status changes for two long-standing wallet specs
BIP-38 - PAPER-WALLET PASSPHRASE
Encodes a passphrase-encrypted private key as a 58-character Base58Check string, using scrypt and salting to resist brute-force. Designed for paper wallets and physical bitcoins. Two encoding variants - direct encryption of a known key, or a shared scheme where the printer never sees the unsalted passphrase. Now formally Deployed.
BIP-78 - PAYJOIN
Payjoin is a way for receiver and sender to both contribute inputs to the same payment, so a chain analyst can't assume the inputs all belong to the sender. Nicolas Dorier's 2019 spec: the receiver advertises a
pj= endpoint in a BIP-21 URI; the sender posts a finalised PSBT; the receiver returns a modified PSBT including their own input. The resulting tx breaks the common-input-ownership heuristic. Now formally Deployed alongside the newer BIP-77 async variant being shipped by wallets like Bull Bitcoin.Other Movement - BIP-176, BIP-10, BIP 3
Notation, withdrawn proposals, and the process layer
BIP-176 - BITS
Standardises "bits" as 100 sats = 1/1,000,000 BTC. Rationale: at high USD prices, sub-$10 amounts get awkward decimals - 0.00067 BTC is harder to read than 670 bits. Assigned 2017-12-12; now Complete. Sits alongside BIP-172 (define subunit as sat) and BIP-177 (redefine base unit) as part of the longer denomination debate.
BIP-10 - CLOSED
Alan Reiner's 2011 "Multi-Sig Transaction Distribution" spec, which standardised an encoding for collecting signatures off-network. Superseded in practice by PSBT (BIP-174), which is the dominant interoperability format today. The BIPs repository now marks BIP-10 as Closed.
BIP 3 - PROCESS
Murch's "Updated BIP Process", assigned 2025-01-09 and currently Deployed. Replaces BIP 2, reduces judgment calls the BIP Editor has to make, clarifies BIP types, and generalises the process to match how the community actually uses the repository. The bitcoindev thread from Anthony Towns raised follow-on questions about issue tracking in
bitcoin/bips.