j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckMÝ<div class="post">There has been a discussion going on <a href="http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=557.msg5789#msg5789">elsewhere</a> about using protocol buffers for bitcoin. To summarise the advantages:<br/><br/>-> Small encoding<br/>-> Very fast<br/>-> Implementations in loads of languages (So writing new clients become a lot simpler)<br/>-> Forwards compatible (indeed, this is most of the point of protocol buffers)<br/>-> Extremely simpleto use in code<br/><br/>So initially I would suggest storing the wallet file using protocol buffers, this isn't a breaking change and immediately makes the wallet file easier for other programs to parse. Eventually I would hope that bitcoin could use protocol buffers for networking.<br/><br/>Some people have been suggesting that protocol buffers might be larger than the custom written packet layout. I suspect that actually it would be *smaller* due to some of the clever encoding used in protocol buffers. To resolve this, I think a test is in order, I shall encode a wallet file/network packet using protocol buffers and compare the size the packets in the current scheme. However, I have no idea what's in a packet, what data is stored in a packet, and in what format?</div> text/html
https://whatsonchain.com/tx/a209f6c3b871176f7f1ad1b283c50bd8f202d8b64ccdff00a511ec585581951b