On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 4:19 AM, Alan Reiner <etothe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 11/16/2014 02:04 PM, Jorge Timón wrote: >> I remember people asking in #bitcoin-dev "Does anyone know any use >> case for greater sizes OP_RETURNs?" and me answering "I do not know of >> any use cases that require bigger sizes". > > For reference, there was a brief time where I was irritated that the > size had been reduced to 40 bytes, because I had an application where I > wanted to put ECDSA in signatures in the OP_RETURN, and you're going to > need at least 64 bytes for that. Unfortunately I can't remember now > what that application was, so it's difficult for me to argue for it. > But I don't think that's an unreasonable use case: sending a payment > with a signature, essentially all timestamped in the blockchain.
You can still send the signature out of band (for example using the payment protocol), and just have the transaction commit to a hash of that signature (or message in general), either using an OP_RETURN output to store the hash, or using the pay-to-contract scheme that Jorge mentioned above. That has exactly the same timestamping properties. My main concern with OP_RETURN is that it seems to encourage people to use the blockchain as a convenient transport channel, rather than just for data that the world needs to see to validate it. I'd rather encourage solutions that don't require additional data there, which in many cases (but not all) is perfectly possible. -- Pieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
