An unknown actor broadcast a Bitcoin transaction Thursday evening embedding the full text of the U.S. Constitution onto the blockchain — permanently and without the possibility of removal.
The transaction, confirmed at 8:25 p.m. UTC on May 28, cost 113,454 satoshis, or about $83.41 in fees, and was processed by mining pool SpiderPool just 14 minutes after it hit the network.
At 44.4 kilobytes, the transaction is far larger than a standard Bitcoin transfer — its bulk comes from the Constitution’s full text, beginning with “We the People of the United States,” written into an OP_RETURN output field and recorded on-chain.
How it worked on Bitcoin
OP_RETURN is a script opcode that allows anyone to attach arbitrary data to a transaction. Outputs tagged this way are provably unspendable — they carry no bitcoin value and exist solely to store information. For years, the field was capped at 80 bytes, limiting its use to short hashes, timestamps, and brief messages.
