An unknown actor broadcast Bitcoin practical On Thursday evening, the full text of the US Constitution was embedded on the blockchain – permanently and without the possibility of being removed.
The transaction was confirmed at 8:25 PM UTC on May 28, cost 113,454 satoshi, or about $83.41 in fees, and was processed by the SpiderPool mining pool just 14 minutes after it hit the network.
At 44.4 KB, the transaction is much larger than a standard Bitcoin transfer — the bulk of which comes from the full text of the Constitution, starting with the phrase “We the People of the United States,” written in the OP_RETURN output field and recorded on-chain.
How did it work on Bitcoin?
OP_RETURN is the script operation code This allows Anyone to attach arbitrary data to a transaction. Outputs marked in this way are almost certainly non-consumable – they hold no Bitcoin value and are only there to store information. For years, the maximum field was 80 bytes, limiting its use to short hashes, timestamps, and abbreviated messages.
That changed with Bitcoin Core v30, Released In mid-2025, removing the byte limit and one OP_RETURN rule per transaction. The developers behind the change argued that the old cap was counterproductive, as users were finding workarounds anyway, and the restriction created more problems than it solved.
This transaction is one of the first high-level uses of this new freedom, exploiting SegWit and Taproot features along with extended OP_RETURN to fit an entire founding document into a single on-chain record.
Writing data to the blockchain is not a new concept. Projects like OpenTimestamps, DOCPROOF, and Factom have spent years pinning document hashes to the chain as tamper-resistant records. The Ordinals Protocol, launched in 2023, pushed this practice further by including images, audio, and code into the witness data of Taproot transactions. What separated Thursday’s inscription was the choice of document — not a hash or a jpeg, but rather the governing charter of the United States, typed out in full.
The inscription arrives during a moment of discussion in the Bitcoin community. BIP-444, pending an offerwould restore the old OP_RETURN cap of 83 bytes, as proponents argue that unlimited data storage undermines Bitcoin’s identity as a monetary network.
The sender claimed no credit, offered no explanation, and left no traceable identity — just the preamble, seven articles, and 27 edits, written in a block now carried by every Bitcoin node on the planet.
