What if we brought back all of Bitcoin’s previous scripting capabilities taken away by Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s the idea behind the Great Script Restoration from Blockstream developer Rusty Russell.
- Bitcoin has a stack-based scripting language, which was truncated in 2010. This resulted in a less expressive scripting language.
- OP_ADD, OP_MUL, OP_CAT, OP_INVERT, OP_LSHIFT and stack element were all opcodes that had no data limit, which could have theoretically entailed exponential, unrestricted use of computing resources when using them. OP_CAT and others were removed entirely, while others were pared down.
- If we restore some of these opcodes with certain limits, we can unlock old (and new!) uses cases for bitcoin
- We need to test out different data limits to see what the optimal computation speed will be.
- “All current opcodes are most reasonably implemented using linear accesses to stack data (though sometimes multiple times), so the the cost model uses the length of the stack inputs (or occasionally outputs).”
