Is the sleeping lion about to wake up?

Some deep players in the Bitcoin ecosystem are feeling that the sleeping lion is about to wake up.

A developer statement on May 6 showed that the next version of Bitcoin Core may abolish the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN output. The statement said that the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN is no longer suitable for current needs. First, it is easily bypassed, and some private mining accelerators do not enforce these restrictions at all; second, it will form a distorted incentive mechanism, and some projects will incentivize some private services in order to bypass the restrictions. At the same time, the statement said that abolishing the 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN has received widespread support.

Currently, the token deployment format OP-20 that breaks the 80-byte limit of OP_RETURN has appeared in the market. The over-the-counter transaction price of the token with the same name op_return is US$400 per piece (1,000 per piece), while the cost is only US$5-6 per piece.

In this article, Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce what OP_RETURN is, what pros and cons the upgrade will have on the Bitcoin network after it is successfully upgraded, and what the prospects are for issuing OP-20 using this mechanism.

The debate surrounding OP_RETURN

In the Bitcoin network, OP_RETURN is a script operation code (opcode) specifically used to carry arbitrary data in transactions. The data carried by OP_RETURN output will not be referenced by subsequent transactions and will not occupy the node's UTXO space.

In the early days, Bitcoin nodes had to keep all unspent outputs (UTXO) permanently. Malicious or uncontrolled data writing would cause node storage pressure. Therefore, in 2013, the community proposed the idea of "lightweighting" data storage by adding an immediate invalidation script. Then in 2014, Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 officially included OP_RETURN output into the "standard output" type, and set the data limit to 40 bytes, which was gradually increased to 80 bytes later to balance data writing needs and network resource protection.

OP_RETURN restrictions no longer meet the needs of Bitcoin ecosystem development

Therefore, Bitcoin developers originally designed OP_RETURN to prevent nodes from over-expanding storage due to processing scripts containing large blocks of data, and used it as a "lightweight record of the blockchain" function. However, with the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, various asset protocols, project parties, L2, and cross-chain bridges need to record more and more data on the chain, and the 80-byte limit of OP_RETURN has gradually become restrictive.

In order to meet project needs, various project parties have to bypass this limitation through various operations, including providing high rewards to miners, etc. Therefore, Greg Sanders, a core contributor of Bitcoin Core, released a statement on GitHub, proposing to remove the 80-byte limit in the next version of Bitcoin Core and allow OP_RETURN outputs of any number and length.

He believes that the removal of the 80-byte limit will bring at least two tangible benefits:

1) It can effectively reduce the occurrence of "high-reward transactions" and "low-count transactions" in the Bitcoin blockchain. The essence of these transactions is to use a small number of transactions to carry a large amount of data, thereby putting pressure on the nodes and the network.

2) It can promote the development of new use cases and applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem. For example, the BRC-20 standard, which is currently popular, is limited by the 80-byte payload to create a maximum of 400 tokens per transaction. After removing the 80-byte limit, the standard can be fully utilized, and more complex and diverse use cases can be supported.

Opposition remains strong

But in fact, Bitcoin Core has not yet officially announced the specific date of the next upgrade. At the same time, there are still many objections under the GitHub where the upgrade was announced.

Community member wizkid057 said that this is far more than a small technical change, but a fundamental change to the nature of the entire Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network will become an arbitrary data storage system instead of developing as a decentralized currency. At the same time, it will also make more data-intensive protocols (such as inscriptions, NFTs) and "junk" data more prevalent.

Upgrade not yet completed, coin issuance first

However, although the next version of Bitcoin Core to abolish the 80-byte upper limit of OP_RETURN has not yet been finalized, a token deployment standard OP-20 that breaks this limit has been quietly launched, and the first token of the protocol, op_return, is suspected to have been minted. The current over-the-counter transaction price is US$