Author: Btc Drak 2014-11-18 17:47:05
Published on: 2014-11-18T17:47:05+00:00
In an email exchange, Flavien Charlon expressed his concern regarding the use of OP_RETURN, stating that it encourages people to use the blockchain as a transport channel. However, he also pointed out that Counterparty, which is the top user of the blockchain for storage and transport, has managed to bypass the 40-byte limit by using multi-sig outputs. Charlon argues that Open Assets needs to store a URL in the OP_RETURN output, along with some bytes of overhead, which cannot be done within the 40-byte limit. Additionally, storing only a hash is inadequate for building something interesting. Charlon conducted research on the number of OP_RETURN outputs in the blockchain for October 2014; there were 1,674 OP_RETURNs for a span of 4,659 blocks. He believes that if increased to 80 bytes, it would have a negligible impact on bandwidth and storage requirements, while being extremely useful for many use cases where a hash only is not enough. However, one of the recipients of the email was unsure about Charlon's statistics, pointing out that Counterparty had not used OP_RETURN encoding but had still conducted over 100,000 transactions since inception, which could have been OP_RETURNs if they had been permitted.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T14:18:21.221235+00:00