* as once I wrote
đź”” đź”” NEW OP_RETURN đź”” đź””
Book of Nakamoto, Chapter 3, Verses 4–11 And Satoshi spake, not in whispers but in hex, saying: “Thou shalt not embed thine data in every field, for the blockchain is not thy diary.” “Yet I bestow upon thee OP_RETURN, a sanctuary for up to 40 bytes — no more, lest ye walk the path of vanity.” “For 40 is the number of discipline: 40 bytes for thy message, no more than is righteous, no less than is truthful.” “And behold, I give thee one more blessing: the coinbase message. A field untouched by consensus, wherein miners may write freely.” “Use it to bear witness, to mark genesis, to declare revolt — as I once wrote about the Chancellor” “But thou shalt not waste it with shills and tokens of greed, or the wrath of prune shall be upon thee.” And so the nodes upheld this covenant, and the mempool was serene. So go forth, brothers and sisters. Let us inscribe only that which is worthy. And let thy payloads be small, lest one abuse the sacred ledger for thine idle bytes. In the name of the Nonce, the Witness, and the Unspent, Amen.
https://mempool.space/tx/91c1fdaa933cd573dfe0cf9ee80d7f9f7f55f72d5da35c8d1abcac734d95c911
Discussion
Do valid tx need a non empty OP_RETURN field, and for what information?
Otherwise, what speaks against outright discarding it at will?
No, the OP_RETURN opcode is optional and not required for valid tx.
I'm an interested observer of this debate but not an expert, so don't have an opinion to give. However I can offer this quote from a piece by John Carvalho earlier today :
> Bitcoin offers an 80‑byte OP_RETURN field that lets users write data without polluting the UTXO set. As blockspace demand soared with Ordinals, BRC‑20, and Runes, people began hiding data in taproot leaves and bare multisig outputs, which never get spent and therefore swell the UTXO set, driving up node costs.
> Relaxing, or even removing, the 80‑byte cap would invite this data back into a provably unspendable, prunable space; the chain stays neutral — every byte either pays or waits.
https://bitcoinerrorlog.medium.com/how-to-think-about-data-on-bitcoin-a5a80442ef68
I read a similar opinion on r/Bitcoin, and if you by nostr:npub13ndpm2hm9hud4azsq5euhf5mv3d05r90wymwxsd7rdn29609hhvqp60svh corroborate the evaluation, it sounds quite plausible, and the change sensible.
Basically the optionality sensibly divides two layers, the cash system, and an accessory comment system.