Recently OpReturn has been at the forefront of news and innovation, because of clever uses like the token-standard SLP on BitcoinCash and because of BSV lifting their Opreturnlimit to allow for on-chain filestorage which allowed for disturbing content to be uploaded. All this sparked debate about storing arbitrary data on the blockchain again and the legal responsibility for distributing illegal content, aswell as my interest in the matter. So here is a reminder
Lets start of with the basics, what is OpRetrun?
OpReturn is a way to embed data onto the blockchain. Many projects like memo, cashAccounts and SLP for all rely on OpReturn.
There are other ways to embed arbitrary data but this one does not create new UTXOs because they are provably unspendable. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/OP_RETURN
What is the OpReturn limit?
On BCH it's 220 bytes.https://www.bitcoinabc.org/2018-04-01-upgrade/
On BTC it's 80 bytes. https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#null-data
on BSV it's 100KB. https://coingeek.com/unwriter-gives-bitcoin-sv-community-blockchain-power/
How is the limit 'enforced'?
" The limitation is a relay standard, but not a consensus rule " see link
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/78572/op-return-max-bytes-clarification
Did Bitcoin Core decrease their OpReturn limit?
I saw a popular post on r/btc misrepresenting the OpReturn story on BTC (https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/80ycim/a_few_months_after_the_counterparty_developers/) so I'm going to link the best summary i have found to straighten the record. The actual size never got suddenly 'decreased' from 80 to 40. But the first standard relay on Bitcoin Core was 40 bytes instead the 80bytes they said at first.
http://www.talkcrypto.org/blog/2016/12/30/op_return-40-to-80-bytes/
it's definitively worth to take a quick look at! If anybody has more information about the first time OpReturn was used (so before 0.9.0 and as non-standard tx) please let me know!
If i missed anything important or got something wrong be sure to let me know!
additional links about the whole counterparty situation or other OpReturn related things very welcome!!!
*spelling fix*
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