Bitcoin OP_CAT upgrade: Could Satoshi’s old code make a come back?

• The Bitcoin OP_CAT discussion was trending once more among developers.
• There were no security concerns regarding the proposal and many benefits, experts said.

Bitcoin [BTC] was trending sideways and downward in the months since the halving, taking the confidence out of long-term investors. One thing that hasn’t slowed down is the developer ecosystem behind the largest crypto asset.

These devoted developers work on many proposals and tools to bring out more decentralized features into the blockchain. One of these was the OP_CAT opcode that was part of the Bitcoin protocol but was removed by Satoshi in 2010 due to security concerns.

What is OP_CAT?

The OP_CAT, also known as BIP-420, is a feature that allows the concatenation, or joining, of two data points within a stack. It then makes these values on top of the stack, making them the first items acted on within a transaction.

This goes a long way in bringing to the Bitcoin network the kind of functionality that the Ethereum smart contracts have. Back in 2010, a concern was that this concatenation feature would take up too much memory usage and potentially introduce vulnerabilities.

In recent years, developers have been yearning to develop ways to do more on-chain, and the OP_CAT was once again a major talking point in technical circles.

Is this a step toward the Bitcoin Satoshi vision?

Co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin marketplace Bioniq Dr. Robert Bodily

posted on X that OP_CAT is way bigger than he originally understood. He went on to state that it would change Bitcoin forever, and clarified that it does not introduce any new security concerns to the Bitcoin network.

CAT would make the Bitcoin Virtual Machine, or BitVM (or BitVM2 that builds on the original BitVM) “significantly better- more efficient, cheaper, more flexible”, he said.

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This proposal is unlikely to shake the stability and security that Bitcoin boasts. It contains only ten lines of code and can be shut off like a “light switch”, asserted Paul Sztorc, inventor of “Drivechains” the Bitcoin soft fork proposal and author of BIP300 and BIP301.

Robin Linus, co-author of the BitVM2, published a document last month that sought to debunk some misconceptions around OP_CAT.