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From: Richard Brady <rnbrady@gmail.com>
To: Bitcoin <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:07:30 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAN5esQJe0uUm0NyctaBa6WH7_JjeE_OLR=FY_XQWnSr50VRDyA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

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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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             reply	other threads:[~2015-01-19 19:07 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 37+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-01-19 19:07 Richard Brady [this message]
2015-01-19 19:09 ` [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding? Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:16   ` Richard Brady
2015-01-19 19:34     ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:48   ` Peter Todd
2015-01-19 19:57     ` Richard Brady
2015-01-19 20:03       ` Alan Reiner
2015-01-19 20:06         ` Peter Todd
2015-01-19 20:40         ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-19 20:56           ` Gavin Andresen
2015-01-19 21:22             ` Brian Hoffman
2015-01-19 20:59           ` Ross Nicoll
2015-01-24 13:19           ` Isidor Zeuner
2015-01-25 22:59             ` Ross Nicoll
2015-03-14 15:58             ` Isidor Zeuner
2015-03-24 12:08               ` Jorge Timón
2015-01-19 21:21         ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:19 ` Matt Whitlock
2015-01-19 19:37   ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-19 19:38   ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 12:45 Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 13:32 ` Wladimir
2015-01-28 14:00   ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 15:42     ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:04       ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 16:52         ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 17:29           ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 17:45             ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:19       ` Giuseppe Mazzotta
2015-01-28 16:51         ` Matt Whitlock
2015-01-28 17:02           ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:34       ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 16:55         ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 17:04           ` Nicolas Dorier
2015-01-28 17:14             ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 17:17               ` Angel Leon
2015-01-28 17:27               ` Nicolas DORIER

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