Currently pool and tag names are bytes because that's what redis expects. One option is to change the tagpool manager to accept unicode and encode/decode using UTF-8 before sending to redis (a bit unclear on whether this would break any code that expects bytes currently). Another option is to have the TagpoolApiServer do the encoding and decoding (but then there's no guarantee that values set via the tagpool manager directly will be decodable). A third option is to have the client encode / decode things as necessary but this might be quite a pain since binary via JSON-RPC is a bit harder than unicode.