Push Operators

Minimal push operations

Bitcoin's scripting language has several operators for pushing data onto the stack. When there are multiple options for how to push the same byte array, the commonly used standardness rules require that the smallest possible encoding be used:

• Pushing an empty byte array must use OP_0.
• Pushing a byte between 0x01 and 0x10 must use OP_1 to OP_16.
• Pushing the byte 0x81 must use OP_1NEGATE.
• Pushing any other byte array up to 75 bytes must use the corresponding OP_PUSHBYTES opcode.
• Pushing 76 to 255 bytes must use OP_PUSHDATA1.
• Pushing 256 to 65535 bytes must use OP_PUSHDATA2.
• Pushing 65536 bytes or more must use OP_PUSHDATA4.

Note that the largest push allowed by consensus rules is 520 bytes, which means OP_PUSHDATA4 is never used in practice.