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An Analysis of Bitcoin OP_RETURN Metadata

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10323))

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Abstract

The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the Bitcoin blockchain beyond transfer of currency. A point of debate in the Bitcoin community is whether loading data through OP_RETURN can negatively affect the performance of the Bitcoin network with respect to its primary goal. This paper is an empirical study of the usage of OP_RETURN over the years. We identify several protocols based on OP_RETURN, which we classify by their application domain. We measure the evolution in time of the usage of each protocol, the distribution of OP_RETURN transactions by application domain, and their space consumption.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source: coinmarketcap.com, accessed on February 28th, 2017.

  2. 2.

    in-script/out-script are called scriptPubKey/scriptSig in the Bitcoin wiki.

  3. 3.

    en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction#Pay-to-PubkeyHash.

  4. 4.

    Hash: d84f8cf06829c7202038731e5444411adc63a6d4cbf8d4361b86698abad3a68a.

  5. 5.

    Regarding the use of OP_RETURN, the release notes of Bitcoin Core version 0.9.0 state that: “This change is not an endorsement of storing data in the blockchain.” At the same time, some Bitcoin explorers, (e.g. blockchain.info, blockexplorer.com, smartbit.com) allow to inspect data encoded in OP_RETURN scripts.

  6. 6.

    Hereafter we aggregate all the protocols built upon Blockstore, by identifying them with Blockstore itself.

  7. 7.

    To verify this conjecture we would need to compare the transaction identifiers of our empty transactions with the identifiers of [35], which are not available online.

  8. 8.

    The release notes of Bitcoin Core version 0.9.0 state that: “Storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea; it is less costly and far more efficient to store non-currency data elsewhere.”.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers of BITCOIN 2017 for their insightful comments on a preliminary version of this paper. This work is partially supported by Aut. Reg. of Sardinia P.I.A. 2013 “NOMAD”.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Massimo Bartoletti & Livio Pompianu

Authors
  1. Massimo Bartoletti
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  2. Livio Pompianu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Massimo Bartoletti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Michael Brenner

  2. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Kurt Rohloff

  3. New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Joseph Bonneau

  4. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Andrew Miller

  5. University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Peter Y.A. Ryan

  6. University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Vanessa Teague

  7. University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

    Andrea Bracciali

  8. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

  9. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Federico Pintore

  10. Agari Inc., San Mateo, California, USA

    Markus Jakobsson

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Bartoletti, M., Pompianu, L. (2017). An Analysis of Bitcoin OP_RETURN Metadata. In: Brenner, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10323. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70278-0_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70277-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70278-0

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