Author: Toby Padilla 2016-01-26 01:02:44
Published on: 2016-01-26T01:02:44+00:00
The author has submitted a new BIP draft for discussion which alters the Payment Protocol to allow for zero value OP_RETURN outputs in serialized PaymentRequests. The Payment Protocol gives merchants a way to build sophisticated transactions by serializing one or more outputs in the form of a PaymentRequest. While the Payment Protocol allows for any valid script in its outputs, it also ignores outputs with zero value. This means BIP70 implementations can encode an OP_RETURN script but must provide a greater than dust value for that output. This BIP allows for zero value OP_RETURN outputs in serialized PaymentRequests. By supporting this BIP, wallets can participate in current and future, unforeseen use cases that benefit from metadata stored in OP_RETURN. Until now OP_RETURN transactions have typically been created and submitted by custom software. If a wallet can process a PaymentRequest with OP_RETURN data as proposed by this BIP, it will support potentially sophisticated Bitcoin applications without the wallet developer having to have prior knowledge of that application.Merchants and Bitcoin application developers benefit from this BIP because they can now construct transactions that include OP_RETURN data in a keyless environment. Again, prior to this BIP, transactions that used OP_RETURN (with zero value) needed to be constructed and executed in the same software. By separating the two concerns, this BIP allows merchant software to create transactions with OP_RETURN metadata on a server without storing public or private Bitcoin keys. As it exists today, BIP70 allows for OP_RETURN data storage at the expense of permanently destroyed Bitcoin. Even fully removing support for OP_RETURN values in the Payment Protocol would still leave the door open to suboptimal data encoding via burning a larger than dust value to an output with a false address designed to encode data. This BIP offers all of the same benefits that come from the OP_RETURN compromise. Mainly that OP_RETURN scripts are provably unspendable and thus can be pruned from the UTXO pool. Without supporting this BIP, wallets that support BIP70 will allow for wasteful data storage.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:18:12.373698+00:00