[Proposal] APIs intended for programmatic consumption should support JSON instead of human-readable strings

[ilitteri]

💥 Proposal

There are two problems if we only provide pretty printed records eg. in the REST endpoints:

1. It forces every client (e.g. every wallet implementation) to build their own parser for this pretty printed output. This is inconvenient but not such a big deal (it can be wrapped in a library and reused).
2. It's coupling programmatic consumers to the human-readable representation of the record. If the representation changes it will inadvertently break clients (or conversely the human-readable representation won't be improved so as not to break clients).