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

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 12:48:26 -0700

On 19 January 2015 12:09:13 GMT-07:00, Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]> wrote:
>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.

Protocol buffers isn't any more hashable than XML or json - round trips aren't deterministic with standard protobuf libraries. To make it deterministic you end up creating a new standard.

I have this problem for an asset representation standard for one of my clients, and I've reluctantly had to roll my own format.