Author: Matt Whitlock 2015-01-19 19:19:50
Published on: 2015-01-19T19:19:50+00:00
Richard Brady, a user inquired about the reason behind the choice of Google Protocol Buffers for payment request encoding in BIP-0070. Although compact binary encoding is important, there are other standard choices available such as ASN.1, which has been around for decades and even has an XML encoding directly convertible to/from the binary encoding with the schema. In practice, the encoding used in BIP70 doesn't matter much, but it's perplexing that Protobuf re-solves a problem solved 40 years ago by ASN.1. Performance is not a strong driver behind the choice of Google Protocol Buffers since payment requests are not broadcast, and the data is crammed into a binary format before attaching it to a non-binary format. Human readability on-the-wire, availability of open-source libraries and APIs for parsing/manipulating/generating, easy hand-crafting of test messages for debugging, easier-to-read and write standards containing examples, thorough specification by independent standards bodies, and being a family are some great things about protocols/encodings like HTTP/JSON/XML.Richard's background is in SIP/VoIP, and he thinks that could be a fascinating use case for this protocol, which he hopes to work on.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T15:28:38.633567+00:00