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🔔 🔔 NEW OP_RETURN 🔔 🔔 Book of Nakamoto, Chapter 3, Verses 4–11 And Satoshi spake, not in whispers but in hex, saying: “Thou shalt not embed thine data in every field, for the blockchain is not thy diary.” “Yet I bestow upon thee OP_RETURN, a sanctuary for up to 40 bytes — no more, lest ye walk the path of vanity.” “For 40 is the number of discipline: 40 bytes for thy message, no more than is righteous, no less than is truthful.” “And behold, I give thee one more blessing: the coinbase message. A field untouched by consensus, wherein miners may write freely.” “Use it to bear witness, to mark genesis, to declare revolt — as I once wrote about the Chancellor” “But thou shalt not waste it with shills and tokens of greed, or the wrath of prune shall be upon thee.” And so the nodes upheld this covenant, and the mempool was serene. So go forth, brothers and sisters. Let us inscribe only that which is worthy. And let thy payloads be small, lest one abuse the sacred ledger for thine idle bytes. In the name of the Nonce, the Witness, and the Unspent, Amen.
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Replies (10)

↩ replying to Gregor
No, the OP_RETURN opcode is optional and not required for valid tx. I'm an interested observer of this debate but not an expert, so don't have an opinion to give. However I can offer this quote from a piece by John Carvalho earlier today : > Bitcoin offers an 80‑byte OP_RETURN field that lets users write data without polluting the UTXO set. As blockspace demand soared with Ordinals, BRC‑20, and Runes, people began hiding data in taproot leaves and bare multisig outputs, which never get spent and therefore swell the UTXO set, driving up node costs. > Relaxing, or even removing, the 80‑byte cap would invite this data back into a provably unspendable, prunable space; the chain stays neutral — every byte either pays or waits. https://bitcoinerrorlog.medium.com/how-to-think-about-data-on-bitcoin-a5a80442ef68
You would encounter little resistance if you were merely adding optionality. Why are you trying to remove the ability of users to set a limit for OP_RETURN if they want to? You are not adding optionality...you are attempting to remove it. If somebody wants to throttle non monetary data from passing through their own node, you are actively making a change which prevents them from opting out. You could easily add the optionality you want WITHOUT removing people's ability to opt out. There is absolutely no justification for removing this option other than as an attempt to force people to adopt a feature they would not adopt voluntarily. You are also gaslighting everyone with this condescending nonsense.