An unknown player broadcast Bitcoin to sell Thursday evening I will put the entire text of the US Constitution on the blockchain – forever and without the possibility of removal.
The operation, which was confirmed at 8:25 pm UTC on May 28, cost 113,454 satoshis, or about $83.41 in fees, and was completed by the mining pool SpiderPool just 14 minutes after it hit the internet.
At 44.4 kilobytes, the transaction is larger than a Bitcoin transfer – most of it comes from the entire Constitution, starting with “We the People of the United States,” written in the OP_RETURN field and recorded on the chain.
How it worked for Bitcoin
OP_RETURN is a script opcode which allows each to bind non-commercial data. Outputs written in this way are immutable – they have no bitcoin value and are available to store more information. For years, this function was limited to 80 bytes, limiting the use of short hashes, timestamps, and short messages.
This changed with Bitcoin Core v30, release in 2025, which removed the limit and the OP_RETURN-per-transaction rule. The developers who introduced the change argued that the old hat was not useful – users found ways to work, and the restrictions caused more problems than they solved.
This transaction is one of the first to use this new freedom, using the SegWit and Taproot features along with the expanded OP_RETURN to combine the entire source document into a single chain record.
Writing data to the blockchain is not a new idea. Projects such as OpenTimestamp, DOCPROOF, and Factom have spent years maintaining blockchain records as unofficial records. The Ordinals Protocol, launched in 2023, furthered this practice by recording images, audio, and code in the evidence data of Taproot events. What separates Thursday’s documents is the choice of document – not a hash or a jpeg, it was a United States government document, written in full.
The document comes at a time of discussion in the Bitcoin community. BIP-444, pending an ideawill restore the old 83-byte OP_RETURN cap, with supporters arguing that unlimited data storage hinders Bitcoin’s identity as an internet currency.
The sender didn’t claim credit, didn’t explain, and didn’t leave any known information – only the Introduction, the Seven Notes, and the 27 Changes, written in the logbook that every Bitcoin node in the world now carries.
