jM3<div class="post"><div class="quoteheader"><a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632.msg6547#msg6547">Quote from: martin on July 29, 2010, 11:29:31 PM</a></div><div class="quote">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. <br/></div>I agree that it could be smaller; not necessarily because of clever encoding, but because it would allow us to drop reserved bytes and the like.<br/><br/><div class="quoteheader"><a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632.msg6547#msg6547">Quote from: martin on July 29, 2010, 11:29:31 PM</a></div><div class="quote">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?<br/></div>That would be the hard part, of course. If you want to test with the version packet (not really ideal, since it's only sent once per connection), I've decoded that fully:<br/><a href="http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231.msg6250#msg6250">http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231.msg6250#msg6250</a></div>
https://whatsonchain.com/tx/da0b5ee09efa6febd79d48e9c0954c8a9c4d2f1ca838d8e79b19757e01dcfc1d