It's been well over a day since the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network upgraded its protocol, and the consensus rules now come with a 32MB block size. Although the block size increase is quite a feat, BCH developers have also expanded the network's default data-carrier-size to 220 Bytes and re-enabled some old Satoshi OP_Codes that were previously removed from earlier codebases. Now over the past 24-hours, lots of people have been playing around with the new BCH features.
Experimenting With the New Bitcoin Cash OP_Codes
Lots of BCH community members have been discussing the new OP_Code features and the additional space added to the network's default data-carrier-size. The first signs of people messing around with the new features came from the Memo and Blockpress developers as both platform's increased posting character limit from 79 to 217.
Both Memo and Blockpress (featured above) now have 217 characters.
This means users of both social media applications can now post more content and everything is saved on-chain. Then shortly after the fork, another OP_Code feature was shown to the community by Openbazaar developer Chris Pacia.
The First Tree Signature on the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain
Pacia built the first tree signature on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain by utilizing the OP_CAT functionality — which creates a more efficient multi-signature combination. The Openbazaar programmer explains for addresses with a large number of keys, a tree signature can use less data. "For addresses with a large number of keys a tree signature can use less data. And unlike normal OP_CHECKMULTISIG, it doesn't require you to expose the keys that were not used in the signing," Pacia explains to the BCH community on May 15. Moreover, Pacia shows his demonstration via a block explorer URL which indicates it was a 1 of 8 multi-sig tree signature.
Chris Pacia's multi-sig tree.
Many individuals were very impressed with the new multi-sig operation that shows innovation in multi-signature technology, and one that could add more BCH privacy in the future. Pacia details his example is a subset of MAST — which stands for 'Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees.' MAST could improve BCH privacy because certain multi-sig scripts could be kept hidden.
"This is like a subset of MAST," Pacia explains.
MAST is more general but can't be done with the current opcodes as far as I know — If we had OP_EVAL then we could I think.
An OP_Code Puzzle With a Message in the Script
After the tree signature our Chief Technology Officer, Emil Oldenburg, also experimented with the Satoshi OP_Codes and created a 'transaction puzzle.' When the puzzle is solved it contains a secret message within the hashed script.
"I made a fun little transaction puzzle with one of the new OP_Codes," Oldenburg explains.
The puzzle is solved with the string "BCH is the best Bitcoin". The script is <String1> <String2> OP_XOR OP_HASH256 <hash1> OP_EQUAL. It's solved by finding the secret String1 that when XORed with String2, after hashing should be equal to hash1.
Etching the Bible's 23,000 Verses Into the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain
Lastly, another anonymous user is pushing the 'arbitrary data spam debate' to the ultimate level. The Twitter handle UK Cryptocurrency showed the cryptocurrency community that a BCH address is currently writing the first testament of the King James Bible to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain at 1sat/Byte. Looking at the Bitcoin Cash transaction ID its Memo states:
Transactions following this continue to be written in the BCH chain with each verse that's found in the King James Bible.
