⭐ Merited by vapourminer (2)
You keep using the term "standard" while there is no such thing in bitcoin.
To me, it doesn't matter which word to use. If you feel uncomforatble about the word "standard", maybe I could replace it with something else, like "specification", "proposal" etc?
Yes those are better, a lot of BIPs have never made it to enforcement stage, which is what the word standard implies.
Once a BIP is published it becomes very hard to walk it back short of a major security vulnerability found in the design in which case they would theoretically release another BIP that deprecates the previous one, in fact that's sort of what happened to BIP39 (minus "major") if you read the comments on the github media wiki page in the bips/ repo they wrote that they discourage its use. That's also what happened to the SSL 3.0 RFC after the POODLE attack was discovered, they published a new one that deprecated its use.
But you can't just obliterate a proposal from existence once its published in the internet because there is the risk that people have already made implementations based on it and deleting the proposal would invalidate those programs in the sense that it can't be proved anymore that they comply with the BIP based on official information.
It's the same reason RFC doesn't delete standards, Git hosting sites discourage you from overwriting remotes with a force push, and well-behaved programs do not reuse version bits that have been allocated for something else.
Meanwhile this is where standards for alternatives to BIP39 have got us to:
