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* [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?
@ 2015-01-19 19:07 Richard Brady
  2015-01-19 19:09 ` Jeff Garzik
  2015-01-19 19:19 ` Matt Whitlock
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 37+ messages in thread
From: Richard Brady @ 2015-01-19 19:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bitcoin

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Hi Gavin, Mike and co

Is there a strong driver behind the choice of Google Protocol Buffers for
payment request encoding in BIP-0070?

Performance doesn't feel that relevant when you think that:
1. Payment requests are not broadcast, this is a request / response flow,
much more akin to a web request.
2. One would be cramming this data into a binary format just so you can
then attach it to a no-so-binary format such as HTTP.

Some great things about protocols/encodings such as HTTP/JSON/XML are:
1. They are human readable on-the-wire. No Wireshark plugin required,
tcpdump or ngrep will do.
2. There are tons of great open source libraries and API for parsing /
manipulating / generating.
3. It's really easy to hand-craft a test message for debugging.
4. The standards are much easier to read and write. They don't need to
contain code like BIP-0070 currently does and they can contain examples,
which BIP70 does not.
5. They are thoroughly specified by independent standards bodies such as
the IETF. Gotta love a bit of MUST / SHOULD / MAY in a standard.
6. They're a family ;-)

Keen to hear your thoughts on this and very keen to watch the payment
protocol grow regardless of encoding choice! My background is SIP / VoIP
and I think that could be a fascinating use case for this protocol which
I'm hoping to do some work on.

Best,
Richard

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 37+ messages in thread
* Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?
@ 2015-01-28 12:45 Nicolas DORIER
  2015-01-28 13:32 ` Wladimir
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 37+ messages in thread
From: Nicolas DORIER @ 2015-01-28 12:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: bitcoin-development

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I agree that the use protocol buffer and x509 by BIP70 is a poor choice.

The choice should have been done to maximize portability, not to maximize
efficiency and flexibility.

What I ended up doing for having a similar codebase on all plateform is to
parse a BIP70 messages with the help of a web service that convert it to
JSON.
I don't like this solution since it had a trust dependency, and the
certificate verification become handled by the web service, not the device.
But even if I solved google buffer problem, I would stumble upon having
headache to validate the x509 certificate chain on every plateforms.

A simple BIP70 using JSON + HTTPS would have make things more easy.
I agree that it requires that the merchant own the domain name of the BIP70
endpoint, but I don't consider such a big of a deal, since this is how
e-commerce works.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 37+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2015-03-24 12:08 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 37+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2015-01-19 19:07 [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding? Richard Brady
2015-01-19 19:09 ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:16   ` Richard Brady
2015-01-19 19:34     ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:48   ` Peter Todd
2015-01-19 19:57     ` Richard Brady
2015-01-19 20:03       ` Alan Reiner
2015-01-19 20:06         ` Peter Todd
2015-01-19 20:40         ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-19 20:56           ` Gavin Andresen
2015-01-19 21:22             ` Brian Hoffman
2015-01-19 20:59           ` Ross Nicoll
2015-01-24 13:19           ` Isidor Zeuner
2015-01-25 22:59             ` Ross Nicoll
2015-03-14 15:58             ` Isidor Zeuner
2015-03-24 12:08               ` Jorge Timón
2015-01-19 21:21         ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-19 19:19 ` Matt Whitlock
2015-01-19 19:37   ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-19 19:38   ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 12:45 Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 13:32 ` Wladimir
2015-01-28 14:00   ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 15:42     ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:04       ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 16:52         ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 17:29           ` Jeff Garzik
2015-01-28 17:45             ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:19       ` Giuseppe Mazzotta
2015-01-28 16:51         ` Matt Whitlock
2015-01-28 17:02           ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 16:34       ` Nicolas DORIER
2015-01-28 16:55         ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 17:04           ` Nicolas Dorier
2015-01-28 17:14             ` Mike Hearn
2015-01-28 17:17               ` Angel Leon
2015-01-28 17:27               ` Nicolas DORIER

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