The purpose of creating BIP 0010 now, is to encourage a standard that developers want to adopt, from the outset. Every developer who is planning to touch multi-signature transactions, is going to have to solve the problem of multi-sig tx exchanges, eventually. By offering an excellent solution before they've started asking the question, there's a good chance people will use it. Hear me out...

Protocols get fragmented when there's multiple competing ways to do something, each having some advantages the others don't have. This leads to developers with differing priorities picking different ones, or creating their own. However, I believe that the problem BIP 0010 seeks to solve is a fairly straightforward problem. There's not a lot of variety in the solutions that could compete against it. People just need a way to pass this data around, and they want it to be as convenient to use, and as easy to implement as possible. In that sense, I think BIP 0010 (or some future variant) is fairly optimal as a building block for higher-level protocols.

If anyone has ideas for why someone would want to create a competing idea to BIP 0010 (besides not being aware of it when they start), I'd like to discuss it. I'm fairly confident that any such ideas could just be added to BIP 0010 and thus reset the question of why anyone would need a competing idea.

On 11/09/2011 03:03 PM, Michael Grønager wrote:

My main concern when it comes to introducing other protocols is that they might never be standard (I think a great number of clients will emerge - and this would be a thing to compete on). If it is part of the p2p network it will be a seamless standard and easy for everyone to use, even across different clients. But I share your concern on the 

/M