Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 174 thoughts

From: William Casarin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 09:58:18 -0700

matejcik via bitcoin-dev <[email-masked]> writes:

> BIP174 is a ad-hoc format, simple to parse by hand; but that results
> in _having to_ parse it by hand. In contrast, protobuf has a huge
> collection of implementations that will do the job of sorting record
> types into relevant struct fields, proper delimiting of records, etc.

seems a bit overkill for how simple the format is, and pulling in a
large dependency just for this is a bit silly. Although making it
protobuf-compatible is an interesting idea, but I fear would be more
work than is worth? I haven't looked closed enough at the protobuf
encoding to be sure.

> ...while at the same time, implementing "protobuf-based-BIP174" by
> hand is roughly equally difficult as implementing the current BIP174.

as a data point, I was able to build a simple serializer[1] in about an
afternoon. I would much prefer to use this lib in say, clightning (my
original goal), without having to have the larger protobuf dependency.

Cheers,

[1] https://github.com/jb55/libpsbt

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