Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>]

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Text formats such as XML or JSON are far less deterministic, are more
loosely specified, have wide variance in parsing, are not very hash-able,
the list goes on.


On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Richard Brady <rnbrady@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Gavin, Mike and co
>
> Is there a strong driver behind the choice of Google Protocol Buffers for
> payment request encoding in BIP-0070?
>
> Performance doesn't feel that relevant when you think that:
> 1. Payment requests are not broadcast, this is a request / response flow,
> much more akin to a web request.
> 2. One would be cramming this data into a binary format just so you can
> then attach it to a no-so-binary format such as HTTP.
>
> Some great things about protocols/encodings such as HTTP/JSON/XML are:
> 1. They are human readable on-the-wire. No Wireshark plugin required,
> tcpdump or ngrep will do.
> 2. There are tons of great open source libraries and API for parsing /
> manipulating / generating.
> 3. It's really easy to hand-craft a test message for debugging.
> 4. The standards are much easier to read and write. They don't need to
> contain code like BIP-0070 currently does and they can contain examples,
> which BIP70 does not.
> 5. They are thoroughly specified by independent standards bodies such as
> the IETF. Gotta love a bit of MUST / SHOULD / MAY in a standard.
> 6. They're a family ;-)
>
> Keen to hear your thoughts on this and very keen to watch the payment
> protocol grow regardless of encoding choice! My background is SIP / VoIP
> and I think that could be a fascinating use case for this protocol which
> I'm hoping to do some work on.
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
>
>
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-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/

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