Bitcoin Protocols and BIPs Articles

How Bitcoin Soft Forks Work made simple. See the main facts, costs, risks and practical checks before you make a decision.

BIP 15 Bitcoin aliases explained as a closed proposal for human-readable payment identities, including discovery, authentication and substitution risks.

BIP 14 Bitcoin user agent made simple. See what the proposal changes, its current status and what it means for Bitcoin users and operators.

BIP 10 multisignature distribution explained: review the historical proposal for exchanging partially signed transactions and why PSBT replaced it.

BIP 13 P2SH address format explained: understand Base58Check version bytes, script hashes, network validation and the relationship to BIP 16.

BIP 12 OP_EVAL explained as a closed soft-fork proposal, including recursive script evaluation, security concerns and replacement by P2SH.

BIP 11 M-of-N transactions explained: understand early bare multisig standardness, CHECKMULTISIG, sigop limits and why P2SH changed deployment.

BIP 1 purpose and guidelines explained: review the original Bitcoin proposal process, document types, editor role and replacement by newer governance rules.

BIP 20 Bitcoin URI scheme explained as the closed predecessor to BIP 21, including payment links, amount encoding, compatibility and migration.

Learn how Bitcoin traceability works, what the public blockchain shows, how addresses become linked to identities, where analysis fails and how to protect privacy.