Author: Flavien Charlon 2014-11-19 00:46:51
Published on: 2014-11-19T00:46:51+00:00
The discussion surrounds the use of OP_RETURN, which allows small amounts of data to be stored within a bitcoin transaction. The proposal is to increase the size from 40 bytes to 80 bytes, however, there are concerns that this could encourage people to use the blockchain as a convenient transport channel. Counterparty is currently not using OP_RETURN encoding and uses multi-sig outputs instead which can store more than 40 bytes. Open Assets needs to store a URL in the OP_RETURN output plus some bytes of overhead, which 40 bytes does not allow for. In October 2014, there were 1,674 OP_RETURNs with an average size of 14.37 bytes per block. Increasing to 80 bytes will have a negligible impact on bandwidth and storage requirements, while being extremely useful for many use cases where a hash only is not enough. It is suggested that the number of CP transactions that would have been OP_RETURNs if they had been permitted (100,000 since inception) should be factored into statistics.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T14:17:58.278518+00:00