Sept. 23, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:35
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Okay, so what is an OP return transaction? | |
| OP return is one of the opcodes in the Bitcoin scripting language. | |
| An opcode is one of many instructions that are understood by nodes when processing transactions. | |
| Bitcoin scripting is called a Bitcoin. | |
| When you send funds from your wallet to an address, two basic scripts come into play. | |
| One script unlocks this is a quote, unlocks the funds from your address or addresses, and another locks the funds to the recipients. | |
| As a regular user, you don't need to create or maintain those scripts, they're just part of your wallet and the overhanging code. | |
| Sent funds become the unspent transaction output or boy, they're not great at acronyms. | |
| UTXO. | |
| I love Unreal Tournament. | |
| UTXO, there we go. | |
| Send funds become the unspent transaction output of a given transaction. | |
| These funds remained locked until the owner of the address decides to do something with them. | |
| Bitcoin's scripting language is also highly customizable. | |
| The rules that govern the transaction are represented in code and can either be public on chain or agreed upon off chain. | |
| Off chain rules allow for greater complexity as well as ensuring sensitive information is kept private and are represented with a hash on the transactions. | |
| So what what are we talking about here? | |
| Well, some examples of these rules are transactions that require multiple signatures before funds are sent. | |
| Transactions that require partial agreement from responsible parties, say two out of three, people must approve time-based approaches, valid only until X time or valid only after X time or shared passwords and so on. | |
| These scripts are typically included in wallet applications, so users do not need to know how to do scripting to perform these kinds of transactions. | |
| The OP return script is another variant that renders the transaction output as unspendable, right? | |
| So you want to always prevent double spending on a blockchain and a lot of uh effort and energy is spent in by most cryptos to make sure you can't double spend, right? | |
| To send your uh because it takes a while to verify transactions on the blockchain, you don't want to say, I'm gonna buy ten things with all of that, right? | |
| I want to buy ten things and then you can only pay for one. | |
| So the OP return script is another variant that renders the transaction output as unspendable. | |
| These transactions are typically submitted with zero Bitcoin and are used to send arbitrary data to the blockchain. | |
| Once confirmed by miners, the miners are the ones who process the blockchain in return for the reward of possibly getting Bitcoin. | |
| This transaction is then available to the rest of the network and relate accordingly. | |
| The OP return script contains an arbitrary value set by the person who created the transaction. | |
| There can only be one OP return output per transaction. | |
| Right? | |
| So it's uh you know, if you've ever sent something by mail, registered, you get a message when it's been sent or signed for or something like that. | |
| Or you send something to someone and you call them and say, Hey, did you get that thing? | |
| Uh so this is the kind of thing, right? | |
| At present the value allowed, as we said by the OP return opcode is eighty-three bytes. | |
| That's eighty-three ones and zeros. | |
| That's pretty small. | |
| This limitation was put in place starting in 2014. | |
| After developers on the Bitcoin network started using it to include significant amounts of data as part of their applications. | |
| So when uh library or LBRY was running, I would uh put uh WAV files on their blockchain. | |
| And I got messages saying, hey, can you replace those with flag files? | |
| In other words, flack off with your web files. | |
| Totally fair. | |
| Totally fair. | |
| There was, I can't remember the name of it now. | |
| There was a video service that I used for quite some time. | |
| I actually spoke with the um CEO for a while. | |
| But there was video service that I used for a while where they were putting video in a blockchain, and uh that did not sadly last. | |
| Well, for reasons of of sort of we can understand, right? | |
| Okay, so why did they put this limitation in 2014? | |
| Well, they wanted to keep transactions on the blockchain small to maintain efficiency and avoid bloat. | |
| Discourage non financial data storage to keep Bitcoin focused as a decentralized payment system, right? | |
| I mean, can you imagine if if uh your visa transactions uh all of them included a selfie, you know, or a five minute video of you singing, hey Macarena. | |
| Well, I mean that would completely kill the speed of the visa network, right? |
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