[iso8859-1]

Your Coindesk source is wrong, the limit was never lowered.

Here is the commit where it was raised from 40 to 80: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5286/commits/a930658...

If you believe if was ever lowered, show me the commit.

The Coindesk articles contains the phrase "OP_RETURN was originally meant to store 80 bytes of extra data in a bitcoin transaction". How do they know what it was originally meant to do? If it meant to do it, why wasn't it in the source?

[bhaak]

The first comment in the pull request is: "The maximum size for OP_RETURN outputs used to be 80 bytes, then got changed to 40 bytes to be on the safe side. We have now been running with 40 bytes for about 9 months, and nothing catastrophic happened to the Blockchain, so I am proposing to increase it back to 80 bytes."

The commit that is referenced by this comment is "script: reduce OP_RETURN standard relay bytes to 40" https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/8175c790eb

There you can see that it was originally 80 bytes.

[iso8859-1]

What do you mean by "originally"? It looks like it was introduced as 80 bytes here, so it had only been 80 bytes for a year or so: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2738

I recognize the commit where the limit was lowered, though I don't believe it was actually released before being raised again.