2025-11-14 –, English Stage Language: English
The growing trend of embedding arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions, like Ordinal inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens, has sparked discussion about how Bitcoin's limited blockspace is being used, how it impacts the long-term size of the UTXO set, and what role miners and node operators should play in relaying or filtering such transactions. Some see this as a natural extension of Bitcoin’s capabilities, while others see it as an inefficient use of the network.
This talk looks at how a proposed soft-fork upgrades (activation of OP_CTV and OP_CSFS) could provide a more purpose-built alternative. These opcodes enable structured, rule-based Bitcoin transactions, making it possible to build advanced protocols without relying on ad-hoc data storage or unusual transaction formats. By introducing clearer ways to define spending conditions and reference external data, they offer a potential path to reduce pressure on the network while still supporting innovation.
This talk provides a technical and contextual overview of the growing conversation around arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions, its motivations, implications, and possible paths forward. With the rise of inscriptions, BRC-20s, and other forms of on-chain metadata, concerns have emerged around how these patterns affect blockspace usage, long-term UTXO set growth, and mempool propagation. These concerns have led to proposed relay-level filtering policies, igniting a broader debate around Bitcoin's role, scope, and neutrality.
Rather than taking a normative stance, the presentation will examine the practical motivations for embedding arbitrary data on-chain, providing examples of sensible, real world use-cases for these. It will then explore how proposed soft-fork opcodes, OP_CTV (CheckTemplateVerify) and OP_CSFS (CheckSigFromStack), could serve as a more principled mechanism to express these use cases. By enabling covenant-based transaction logic and external signature validation, these opcodes allow for compact, auditable protocols that avoid witness-stuffing or nonstandard transaction formats.
The talk will conclude by considering how these tools might evolve Bitcoin’s contract design space while reducing unintended incentives for inefficient data embedding, offering a path forward for protocol expressiveness without policy-based enforcement.
CTO and Co-founder of illuminodes , leading and building the tools for a truly decentralized future based on open source, decentralized protocol technology.