Author: Turkey Breast 2013-06-18 22:30:30
Published on: 2013-06-18T22:30:30+00:00
In an email exchange between Mike Hearn and Turkey Breast on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Turkey Breast shared a link to BIP 60 which proposed a protocol upgrade to ensure messages always had a fixed number of fields per protocol version. However, Mike pointed out that version messages have always been variable length and there's nothing inherent in the Bitcoin protocol that says all messages are fixed length. Mike suggested instead making a fixed number of fields per protocol, so given a protocol version number, you know the number of fields in a message. This would not only be easier for parsing messages but also good practice. Mike also questioned why a 1 byte flag needs to be optional.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T19:07:29.616099+00:00