Bitcoin has a process for proposing consensus changes but nothing that says when one's actually ready to activate. No required review period, no code maturity bar, no method for estimating chain split risk, no agreed activation threshold. I wrote a paper trying to fill that gap and I'd rather have it argued with here than ignored.

The part I most want people to poke at is the risk math. The worst thing that can happen in an activation is a permanent chain split, and how likely that is comes down almost entirely to how much hashrate enforces the new rules when it goes live. Run the standard chain race math and it's not a gentle slope, it's a cliff. Around 55% enforcement you get roughly a 30% chance of a six block reorg during activation. At 90% or higher it basically vanishes, several orders of magnitude lower. So a lot of the governance fighting is really a fight over one number the math already gives us. If I've got that wrong I want to know where.

The paper also lays out a 20 point readiness scorecard across proposal quality, code quality, activation safety and community process, and scores three real changes with it. Taproot comes out 17/17 on the criteria that apply, after about four years of review and no split. SegWit2x lands around 5/17, the 2017 hard fork that miners and exchanges backed and then pulled. BIP-110 scores 3/20, with a 55% threshold and about six weeks from proposal to activation client.

It grades how a change was pushed, not whether it should happen, so the same test applies whether a change tightens the rules or loosens them. Pull it apart if it doesn't hold up.

Free PDF, 98 pages. https://github.com/asaffulks/consensus-change-standards/raw/main/consensus_change_standards_v4.pdf