Propose a standard
Getting a BRC written
There is no committee and no bureaucracy. A BRC is a markdown file in a public repository, and proposing one means opening a pull request. What follows is the whole process.
I have an idea
Open a discussion first. It costs three paragraphs and tells you whether the thing already exists under a name you did not know.
I am ready to write it
Fork the repository, add one markdown file to the right topic directory, and open a pull request.
The three steps
Start a discussion, if you are not certain yetoptional
The repository has an issue template for exactly this. It asks for a summary, one concrete situation where the standard would be useful, and confirmation that it is relevant to BSV. Nothing else.
Skip it if you already know what you are writing. It exists so you can find out that BRC-63 covers your idea before you spend a weekend on it.
Write one markdown file
Copy the structure below into a new file in whichever of the 12 topic directories fits:
wallet/,transactions/,payments/and so on. The upstream EXAMPLE.md is the canonical template, and it is a joke standard about banana-powered wallets, which tells you something reassuring about how much ceremony is expected.The structure is a guideline rather than a gate. Plenty of existing standards depart from it, and several predate it entirely. The Specification section is the one that matters: someone should be able to build a compatible implementation from it alone.
Starter template# BRC-?: Your Title Here Your Name (you@example.com) ## Abstract One paragraph, high level. What does this standard define? Someone should be able to read this alone and know whether the rest is relevant to them. ## Motivation Why does this exist? What is broken, missing, or ambiguous today? Name the problem before naming the solution. ## Specification The bulk of the document. Everything needed to build a compatible implementation, without reading anything else. Be precise about formats, encodings, orderings and failure cases. ## Implementations Where this is implemented, or how it could be. A reference implementation, a library, or a worked example. ## References Any footnotes or external material cited above.
Open a pull request
The pull request template asks you to say which of two things it is: a new standard, or an amendment to an existing one. A new standard also requests the assignment of a BRC number.
You do not choose your own number. Write
BRC-?in the title and let review assign it. The highest number in the repository today is 227, but numbers are not always sequential and guessing one that is already taken just creates work.
Changing an existing standard
Typos, clarifications and added context can be edited in place. A substantial revision cannot: people have already built against the text as written, and changing it underneath them breaks their software.
So a substantial change becomes a new standard that extends or revises the old one, and the old one stays exactly where it is. That is why BRC-96 extends BRC-62 rather than editing it, and why two standards in this corpus share the title “Simplified Payment Verification”.
After it merges
Beersy checks the repository every day and opens a pull request when anything changes, so a merged standard appears here shortly afterwards with its diagram and summary generated from your text.
If a summary here misreads what you wrote, that is our bug rather than yours. Every page carries a “was this helpful” control, and the spec text on it is always the version you merged.