If you mean the menu is the digital token of something and the food is the actual thing that token represents, then Bitcoin is the first time ever that the menu is the food
A scarce entry on the ledger of an effectively immutable notarization service is the informational representation of something as well as the thing itself
OP_Return is not in the whitepaper but was added years later in 2014.
Would you say that Bitcoin was economically illiterate when it was created but they fixed it by adding this extra message thing? which Bitcoiners argue is irresponsible to actually use...
However, op_return messages burn bitcoin, which means if everyone (eventually) converts all their bitcoin to op_return messages, there will be no more incentive for everyone to keep duplicating/validating these records and they will become insecure.
That’s incorrect. You can burn bitcoin if you want to with OP_RETURN but you can also use it without burning it (sending 0 to the unspendable address). The fee you pay to miners doesn’t leave circulation.
OP_RETURN was added to discourage other data storage schemes on the blockchain. People were already recognizing and utilizing the immutability of the chain to store non-financial data, and they’re still doing that to this day with ordinals.
OP_RETURN didn’t introduce the idea of storing other data on the blockchain, it made it orders of magnitude more efficient (storing hash proofs instead of the data itself, and allowing nodes to prune the output as unspendable)
How do you notarize something on the blockchain without op_return?
You don’t need to burn coins with OP_RETURN. You can send 0 to the OP_RETURN and just pay the fee to include the transaction. No coins are “burned” (removed from circulation), and your 80 bytes of data is on the blockchain forever.
There’s also this ordinals hack but don’t ask me how it works, it seems like a passing fad to me due to cheap fees, like satoshi dice was for example
