Quote from: Envrin on February 08, 2014, 02:58:47 AM

It's been a while, and can't see anything on the Bitcoin Foundation's blog about it. Any idea when it's getting released? And is it 100% confirmed we'll be able to store up to 80 bytes of data in a transaction? That would be a god-send for us.

You already can store data in transactions; OP_RETURN just makes it easier to do that in ways that harm the Bitcoin network less. For instance see Mastercoin's "class B" encoding: https://github.com/mastercoin-MSC/spec#class-b-transactions-also-known-as-the-multisig-method

My advice for new projects is to support multiple encoding methods, the same was Mastercoin did, so you aren't dependent on the Bitcoin devs. Incidentally there's no practical way to stop all those methods - even P2SH^2, itself a very invasive change to the ecosystem which is unlikely to happen, can't stop encoding data in P2SH scriptSigs without merkleized abstract syntax tree support and risky changes to the scripting language... and that in turn has the big risk that you make upgrades in the future, perhaps because a crypto algorithm has been weakened, much more difficult to implement.

Of course, that's why I'm spending my time working on actually improving fundamental scalability rather than wasting time trying to tell people what to do with a trust-free decentralized system...