In brief
An anonymous Bitcoin user inscribed the text of the American Constitution on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The act was possible as thanks to the OP_RETURN output field and last year's removal of a byte limit.
The user paid around $83 in transaction fees to achieve the feat, though it's not yet known who inscribed the text.
We the people of the cryptocurrency ecosystem... can now read the entire U.S. Constitution directly from the Bitcoin blockchain. The feat was made possible late Thursday when an anonymous Bitcoin user inscribed the document’s text directly onto the immutable blockchain, making it accessible on-chain for the duration of the network’s existence.The 44.4 kilobyte transaction—significant in size for Bitcoin—cost the user around $83.41 in transaction fees, according to a blockchain explorer.By comparison, other, simpler Bitcoin transactions around the same time—like a transfer of around 0.01 BTC—registered at just 227 bytes, or around 0.5% of the size as the inscription. Even when overpaying by more than 105x, that transaction cost just $17, or about 20% of the Constitution’s etching.
