[ad_1]
Quick take
- Bitcoin allows users and businesses to incorporate 80 bytes of arbitrary data into their blockchain through OP_RETURN transactions
- Many in the community have discussed whether people should be allowed to add these arbitrary data, believing that these transactions should be considered spam
- VeriBlock is a new startup that leverages OP_RETURN for its business and has sparked a new wave of debates about what should be considered spam transactions
The role of Bitcoin as a data repository is often a topic of discussion for many in space. In the past, members of the Bitcoin community discussed the benefits of allowing the association of arbitrary data not associated with bitcoin transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
On one side of the debate, we have those who argue that as long as the embedded data is paid with transaction fees, all data should be accepted in the blockchain. On the other hand, we have purists who believe that Bitcoin's blockchain should contain only the data needed to validate bitcoin transactions and nothing else. Their argument stems from concerns of bloat blockchain. That is, since each node on the Bitcoin blockchain must maintain and refer to the unspent transactional output set (UTXO), the excess data generated by these arbitrary data points would create a high pressure on the size of the blockchain – increasing the speed at which grows.¹
View the UTXO model of Bitcoin from Bitcoin.org
In response to internal struggles, on October 22, 2013, Bitcoin Core developers combined pull request # 2738 to accept OP_RETURN as a valid transaction type, providing users with 80 bytes of space for the incorporation of arbitrary data. OP_RETURN allows users to mark transaction outputs as non-expendable by removing these outputs from the UTXO set, keeping their data on the blockchain. This allows users to verify a data point without forcing the nodes that maintain that data point.
A few months later, after activating OP_RETURN, pull request # 3737 was merged to reduce the size of the OP_RETURN byte to 40 bytes for fear of being abused. On 3 February 2015, the size of the OP_RETURN byte was changed to 80 bytes in the pull request # 5286, after the developers confirmed that OP_RETURN was relatively safe.
The activation of OP_RETURN has led to creative uses on Bitcoin. Companies and users can now insert a variety of information, from simple messages to notary documents, onto the Bitcoin blockchain. For example, this transaction entered a hexadecimal number (4d656c6f6e732e) which, when converted to text, produces the following message: "Melons".
Embedded message that uses OP_RETURN in the Bitcoin testnet as shown by BlockTrail
Companies have also used OP_RETURN to offer notary, messaging and security services. These activities included Proof of Existence, CoinSpark and the latest company facing a new wave of criticism, VeriBlock.
VeriBlock is a startup that uses OP_RETURN and Bitcoin's blockchain to protect alternative blockchain networks. According to its white paper, the Proof-of-Proof (PoP) consent protocol of VeriBlock "aims to enable a blockchain that inherits security to inherit the complete security of proof of work of a security that provides blockchain." Bitcoin is the security that provides blockchain that VeriBlock is starting with.
The PoP protocol works as follows:
- A PoP miner periodically retrieves the blockchain state data of the most recent data from a blockchain that inherits security.
- PoP miner publishes this data on the status of the blockchain on a security that provides blockchain as an OP_RETURN transaction, along with an identifier that demonstrates that they were the ones who published this data.
- The PoP miner waits for the transaction to be included in a block of security blockchain.
- The PoP miner takes the identifier (proof) he has previously added and submits it to security by providing blockchain to collect their taxes.
This process allows a security that inherits the blockchain to refer to a specific event on a security that provides blockchain. The ability to refer to data on a highly secure blockchain protects a less secure blockchain from potential attacks such as a block reorganization attack, which could potentially reverse transactions on a blockchain. In the event of an attack, the security inheriting the blockchain could retrieve the data they have incorporated into a protection that provides blockchain and republish this data on their network.
View the PoP protocol of VeriBlock from its white paper
The new debates on OP_RETURN started with Jameson Lopp & # 39; s Tweet January 5th. According to Lopp, who is CTO of Crypto custody provider Home, VeriBlock has been identified as the protocol behind the highest volume of output OP_RETURN. Data from opreturn.org showed that in December 2017 VeriBlock published 784k OP_RETURN transactions and according to Lopp, they are on track to publish 1.5 million transactions in January 2018.
By running the numbers, we find out that VeriBlock could potentially create 23% of all bitcoin transactions in January: 1,500,000 transactions / (1,500 average transactions per block * 144 average blocks per day * 30 days per month) .²
The percentage of VeriBlock's contribution in such a short period has reignited the OP_RETURN spam debate. Once again, members of the Bitcoin community took different positions in the debate. Blockstream developer Riccardo Casatta tweeted that "if you pay the commission is not spam". Casatta, however, challenged VeriBlock's move to include more than one transaction per block, when their Proof of Proof protocol would work well with a transaction per block. In response to Casatta's comment, Bitcoin's main developer Luke Dashjr supported just because someone pays a fee does not mean it's not spam. Dashjr compared OP_RETURN users with email spammers who paid bandwidth to send spam to a person's inbox.
Deciding whether VeriBlock is spamming, however, is like trying to figure out if the letter of the law or the spirit of the law is the superior interpretation for legislative statutes – it all depends on who you ask. What we can explore, however, is that the state of VeriBlock goes on. The PoP protocol of VeriBlock is intrinsically linked to the Bitcoin transaction fee. If the company continues to increase the number of transactions created using OP_RETURN and filling the limited blocking of Bitcoin, the market will increase the price of transaction fees to the point that it makes VeriBlock uneconomical to continue to increase its transactions.
¹ Richard Gendal Brown has a good explanation how UTXOs work on Bitcoin.
² Although more stringent methods exist to calculate this percentage, we believe this provides a sufficiently accurate representation of VeriBlock's contribution. Data from "transactions per block" are provided by blockchain.com. For the calculation we took a one-year moving average of bitcoin transactions per block.
[ad_2]Source link
