BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?



Summary:

The author of the message is questioning the choice of Google Protocol Buffers for payment request encoding in BIP-0070. He argues that the performance benefits are not relevant since payment requests are not broadcast and are instead a request/response flow, similar to a web request. Additionally, using binary format to attach it to a non-binary format such as HTTP seems unnecessary. The author suggests that HTTP/JSON/XML protocols have advantages including being human-readable on-the-wire, having open source libraries/APIs for parsing/manipulating/generating, ease of hand-crafting test messages for debugging, easier to read and write standards, examples within the standards, thorough specification by independent standards bodies, and being part of a family. The author is interested in watching the payment protocol grow regardless of encoding choice and believes that SIP/VoIP could be a fascinating use case for this protocol.


Updated on: 2023-06-09T15:32:24.455236+00:00