History of OP RETURN
Revision as of 17:38, 6 January 2020 by Joshua Henslee (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The OP_RETURN opcode has a controversial history that has culminated to it being used as the primary mechanism to store arbitrary data on-chain. The original functionality was...")
The OP_RETURN opcode has a controversial history that has culminated to it being used as the primary mechanism to store arbitrary data on-chain. The original functionality was intended to behave as a return operation that ends execution of the script. The original implementation had a critical bug where one could steal anyone's Bitcoins and was quickly disabled by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Original functionality
OP_RETURN was originally intended to return the top value on the stack. Given the script:
OP_TRUE OP_RETURN
True would be returned from the script.