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.
That changed with Bitcoin Core v30, released in mid-2025, which stripped away the byte limit and the one-OP_RETURN-per-transaction rule. Developers behind the change argued that the old cap was counterproductive — users were finding workarounds anyway, and the restriction created more problems than it solved.
This transaction is one of the first high-profile uses of that new freedom, exploiting SegWit and Taproot features alongside the expanded 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 spent years anchoring document hashes to the chain as tamper-proof records. The Ordinals protocol, which launched in 2023, pushed the practice further by inscribing images, audio, and code into the witness data of Taproot transactions. What separates Thursday’s inscription is the choice of document — not a hash or a jpeg, it was the governing charter of the United States, written in full.
The inscription arrives during a moment of discussion in the Bitcoin community. BIP-444, a pending proposal, would restore the old 83-byte OP_RETURN cap, with backers arguing 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 — only the Preamble, seven Articles, and 27 Amendments, written into a block that every Bitcoin node on the planet now carries.
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