Innovation in Bitcoin

Bitcoin has undergone many changes and is still evolving into a more and more robust and better system by addressing various weaknesses in the system. Performance has been a topic of hot debate among Bitcoin experts and enthusiasts for many years. As such, various proposals have been made in the last few years to improve Bitcoin performance, resulting in greater transaction speed, increased security, payment standardization, and overall performance improvement at the protocol level.

These improvement proposals are usually made in the form of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) or fundamentally new versions of Bitcoin protocols, resulting in new networks altogether. Some of the changes proposed can be implemented via a soft fork, but a few need a hard fork and, as a result, give birth to a new currency.

In the following sections, we will look at the various BIPs that can be proposed for improvement in Bitcoin. Then, we will discuss some advanced protocols that have...