the labitbu craze is getting out of hand 😅 each of the hundreds of chunky dark green transactions here contains a collectible pixelated rabbit(?) encoded in the taproot control block...

here's what one of those transactions looks like. the third item in the taproot witness data is called the "control block", and is being cleverly (ab)used to store this 4kB png file.

this is possible because taproot commits to merkle trees of possible scripts up to 128 levels deep. to spend, you present one such script, plus a key + list of hashes describing a path through the merkle tree that proves it committed to that script. this is the "control block".

as it turns out, you can build merkle trees out of fake branches containing arbitrary data instead of real hashes. which means you can store 128 levels × 32 bytes = 4kB of arbitrary data per taproot spend with ~zero overhead!

here's one such 128-level-deep path through a taproot merkle tree. each of the "dead end" branches in this tree is a fake hash containing 32 bytes of arbitrary data.

despite being free to mint and totally uncapped, early labitbu taproot assets are allegedly already being traded OTC in chinese degen groups