TIL that cashu tokens are base64-encoded JSON.
WTF people. Have you never heard of binary serialization? No wonder cashu has such huge, hard to scan, QR codes.
Discussion
Somewhat for the same reason NOSTR is JSON not a smaller binary packing, because JSON is near universally usable, even if pretty crap
Low dev effort to get started using a thing is important, perfect enemy of good
This is financial crypto we're talking about. If you can't decode some binary serialization you shouldn't be working on it.
GM
Yeah we didn't optimize for size *at all* yet. Token encoding is purely client-side, cashuA... is base64, cashuB... will be binary.
Btw, you're the first person I've ever seen who managed to get a triple-nut token scanned. Since the problem can't be solved generally, the real solution is animated fountain QR codes.
Classic Bitcoin core dev mindset
can be good but it's led to all kinds of really stupid mistakes:
- bech32 (broken) and bech32m (the fix) imo both worse than satoshis original base58
- xonly pubkeys
- segwit (we can just prune signatures lol)
- there's probably more
Cashu v2 would be nice, incorporating lessons learned so far
Pfff... how inefficient :D
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