Because that's what I get back from the server. For many of the fields (ints, bools and empty strings) there would be no easy way to determine if a value is populated or not.  Looks like that is the way in which protocol buffers handle the "optional" keyword, too.  The `protoc-c` compiler must be adding that `has_` field to clarify the presence of an optional field in a message.

https://github.com/basho/riak_pb/blob/develop/src/riak_kv.proto#L65