Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A proposal to reintroduce the disabled script opcodes

From: Ethan Heilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 May 2017 10:41:40 -0400

>It'd help your case if you gave us some examples of such scripts being
used.

I want OP_CAT so that I can securely and compactly verify many hashes and
hash preimages. This would shrink offchain Tumblebit transactions
significantly.

For instance if I want a transaction TxA which checks that a transaction
TxB releases preimages x1,x2,...,x10 such that
y1=H(x1), y2=H(x2),...,y10=H(x10). Currently I just put y1,...y10 and check
that the preimahes hash correctly. With OP_CAT I would only have to store
one hash in TxA, yhash

ytotal = H(OP_CAT(H(OP_CAT(y1, y2)),y3)...y10)

TxA could then just hash all the preimages supplied by TxB and confirm they
hash to TxA. This would reduce the size of TxA from approx 10*32B to
32+10*16B. I have a version which improves this further but it is more
complex.

Most of the math OP codes aren't particularly helpful due to their 32bit
nature and their strange overflow behavior.