Given OP_VER was never used, is disabled and not considered useful can its meaning be stripped and it be made OP_SUCCESS? Given OP_VER (0x62) was never used onchain, is disabled and is not considered useful can its meaning be stripped and it be made OP_SUCCESS for the purposes of introducing a new different opcode in future?
As Andrew Poelstra describes &quot;..there was an opcode called OP_VER, OP version. I can see some grimaces. It would push the client version onto the stack. This meant that when you upgraded Bitcoin say from 0.1 to 0.2, that’s a hard fork. Now script will execute OP_VER and push 0.1 onto the stack for some people and 0.2 onto the stack for other people. You’ve forked your chain. Fortunately nobody ever used this opcode which is good. &quot;
BIP 342 does exactly this. (Thanks Pieter)