Quote from: RoxxR on March 29, 2014, 07:14:51 AM

Quote from: Peter Todd on March 29, 2014, 06:30:36 AM

Quote from: dexX7 on March 28, 2014, 11:54:05 PM

OP_RETURN can be used to store references to external resources, say for example very long meta transactions that don't fit into 40 byte, an asset contract or whatever. The storage pointed to could be a website which lists something like (for the sake of an example), a side chain or a P2P structure like a DHT. To my knowledge this was discussed several times, but never tested on a broader scale.

You know, an interesting question to ask yourself is if it's totally ok to just embed a hash of the actual data in the blockchain, and rely on the data itself being made available by some DHT or something, why can't Bitcoin itself do that to make blocks smaller and improve scalability?

Remember that Bitcoin would work just fine if miners didn't validate transactions if clients implemented client-side validation, as is done in Mastercoin and Counterparty, and to a lesser extent, Colored Coins. What's so special about actually putting those tx's in the block?

+1000 awesome point.

No, it's not, it's a silly point.

Bitcoin includes transactions because it validates the data inside them.

Bitcoin clearly does not validate Counterparty data. I am free to include Counterparty data in my own transactions at any time. I am free to spend Counterparty coins to myself at any time, etc. Bitcoin doesn't care.

The level of validation performed by the bitcoin network is the same, whether full counterparty data or a simple hash is in the blockchain.