Did you know OP_RETURN had a bug that allowed anyone to spend anyone's Bitcoins?
The bug would skip over the instructions and return 1, interpreted that spending conditions are meet.
But was found and reported by Artforz in 20 July 2010.
A fix was quickly issue by Satoshi and downplayed, probably in the hope of not triggering an exploit.
He also included some improvements in the upgrade.
The fix made the OP CODE return false, meaning outputs are now provably unspendable. - i.e. can never be spent = burned!
In 2013 people were doing odd hacks to insert in the blockchain:
- random data
- use it as a timestamp
But these hacks would forever stay in the the UTXO set!
A decision to set OP_RETURN as a parameter that allowed 40 bytes of data to be added.
This data can be pruned!
And ever since it was introduced, OP_RETURN always caused controversy and was changed quite a few times.
And the conversation was always about HOW MUCH data it should allow?
And now we are having this conversation yet again.
What do you think?