Improvement proposals are crucial to the health and evolution of cryptocurrencies, with the Bitcoin and Ethereum‘s ecosystems at the forefront of several improvement proposals since their inceptions.
While Bitcoin has proposals like Lightning Network, Taproot/Schnorr signatures, Miniscripts, and many other promising improvement upgrades, ETH also has also seen proposals like EIP 20, EIP 137, EIP 1155, EIP 1679, and EIP 1559, each of them having had a significant impact on the coin. The upcoming launch of ETH2.0 has fueled a lot of excitement in the community.
The Ethereum Foundation’s Hudson Jameson appeared on a recent podcast and spoke about the various improvement proposals on ETH. Comparing EIPs with BIPs, he noted that making improvement proposals on ETH was way easier, when compared to Bitcoin. He stated,
“Our technical standards – EIPs have something called ERCs, a type of EIP, and this will make BTC people go crazy. There’s social consensus involved here. Many projects use ERC, and if the majority of them like it, then it becomes the standard, whereas, in BTC, that’s not the case. Approving a BIP is a complicated process.”
That makes sense because getting a BIP approval is an extensive process. It requires community consensus and even before this consensus, the BIPs go through a lot of stages – drafted, verified, accepted, and rejected or replaced. However, in an EIP, as mentioned by Jameson, the proposal liked by a majority of users will become the standard.
Further commenting on why the turnover rate of EIPs is higher than other coins, including BTC, Jameson added,
“It’s a number of things. Firstly, anyone in the EIP process can make a draft for EIP, as long as it is not harmful. There are hundreds of drafts in EIP. Whereas in BIP, you have to be approved to draw the draft; all of Bitcoin’s governance depends on selected people.”
If looked at it this way, though Bitcoin is called the king coin, its blockchain does face many challenges. BTC core developers have to put in a lot of effort to keep intact the top coin’s dominance in the space. Additionally, given the huge ecosystem of Bitcoin, it sometimes gets difficult to understand the problems and drawbacks of the coin in its entirety. The fact that there have not been many upgrades introduced lately is proof of this statement.
