Bitcoin is about to get two significant updates: a way to embed information about ‘smart property’ into transactions, and a better way to calculate transaction fees. Bitcoin’s lead developer Gavin Andresen made the announcement yesterday in his fifth Core Development Update.

The latest update uses a new type of transaction to give people the chance to associate their own data with their bitcoin transactions, which is something that wasn’t explicitly allowed before. The team is doing this by enabling OP_RETURN, a transaction parameter that will let people embed a tiny 80 bytes of data into a blockchain transaction record directly.  Continue reading →