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frequently asked questions about BIP-420 yesterday, the proposed OP_CAT upgrade for bitcoin was assigned a BIP number: BIP-420! this is an important milestone and everyone is excited! we received many questions, so in this post we will try to explain what this all means! what’s a BIP? a BIP is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. it is a document that describes the details of a proposal, in order to help inform the community and foster discussion. BIP-420 documents the OP_CAT proposal, its motivation, how it would work and how it would be implemented. what are BIP numbers for? BIP numbers help facilitate discussion by creating a reference for each proposal document. instead of saying “the taproot BIP” we can say “BIP-341” and instead of saying “the OP_CAT BIP” we can just say “BIP-420”. it makes it easier for the community to refer to specific proposals when discussing them. that’s all! now that OP_CAT was assigned with BIP-420, does that mean it will necessarily be activated on bitcoin? NO! a BIP number is just that: it’s a number for the proposal. that doesn’t mean the proposal would be adopted by the community, and in fact many BIPs with numbers haven’t been adopted. however, the fact that BIP-420 was assigned to OP_CAT is a symbolic milestone which demonstrates growing interest in the community to discuss and evaluate the OP_CAT upgrade. who assigns BIP numbers? BIP numbers are assigned by the bitcoin community, in a decentralized process of rough consensus similar to the rules of bitcoin itself. no specific person controls the rules of bitcoin, and no specific person controls the BIP numbers. there are a few guidelines that must be met before a number is assigned, eg: the BIP must be relevant to bitcoin, must be in English and easily readable and understood, must not have known errors in it, the BIP number must not conflict with pre-existing BIPs, etc following recent updates to the OP_CAT BIP it now fulfills those requirements, and therefore the bitcoin community has decided to assign it with the BIP number BIP-420! was the BIP-420 number “self-assigned”? NO! it is generally frowned upon by the bitcoin community for BIP authors to assign BIP numbers to themselves. thankfully, BIP-420 was NOT self-assigned by its authors. the BIP is authored by ethan heilman and armin sabouri, and neither of them assigned the number, therefore BIP-420 was NOT self-assigned. BIP-420 was assigned by the bitcoin community, due to growing interest in discussing the OP_CAT upgrade! thank you all for your support! why isn’t BIP-420 updated in my favorite BIP repository? to maintain decentralization, many copies of the BIP documents exist all over the web. it might take some time for the maintainers of those copies to update them after a new BIP number is assigned. one of the popular repositories of BIP documents was previously managed by former bitcoin contributor luke dashjr, however luke has informed the bitcoin community that he no longer has time to maintain that repository. that repository is onboarding new maintainers this week and we expect that they’ll update their copies of the OP_CAT BIP with its newly assigned BIP-420 number very soon! what can i do to help BIP-420 bring OP_CAT back to bitcoin? OP_CAT was satoshi’s favorite pet and OP code (scripting function). it was already part of the original release of bitcoin in 2009, before being temporarily disabled. when turned back on, it will enable permissionless bridging on bitcoin, fast and decentralized trading, verification of zk proofs, smart contracts, and more, all with just 10 lines of code! you can learn more about BIP-420 at the github repository linked in the first reply below. if you support the change, please add the label “BIP-420 🐱” to your twitter name like i did, to show your support! also follow @quantumcats and turn on notifications 🔔 for all the latest BIP-420 updates. meow!