Multiple method invocation messages

[whyrusleeping]

I think it would be really great if we were able to submit multiple method invocations per message. This would make quite a few 'smart contract programming' UXs much nicer.

We definitely don't have to do this right away, but its worth considering for launch.

[whyrusleeping]

I'm thinking that this will be more and more important to making filecoin work well. users of the network will want to make many invocations at a time (posting bids, making deals, etc), and having to include a 65 byte signature as well as the overhead of several other fields per call will hurt.

I propose changing the Message type to:

type Message struct {
        Sig Signature 
        Nonce uint64
        GasPrice *TokenAmount

        Invocations []Invocation
}

type Invocation struct {
        To Address `json:"to"`
        Value *TokenAmount
        GasLimit Integer
        Method string
        Params []byte
}

[phritz]

Makes sense to me. WRT nomenclature I think I'd prefer to preserve the notion that a message is a transaction is an invocation, meaning maybe call the outer thing MessageSet and the inner thing a Message. The idea that message is an actor invocation goes pretty deep.

[whyrusleeping]

@phritz that seems reasonable, though i'm not a fan of MessageSet for the name of the outer thingy.

Also, After running some calculations on total storage capacity over time, I think this is a definite must have for release. the overhead of sending many messages for bids, asks, deals, commits, etc is very non-trivial.