Real-world experience with stealth address implementations used by Cryptonote/Monero/etc. have shown that being able to attach a number of some kind to each stealth-sent txout is valuable. For instance an exchange with many customers can use such #'s to disambiguate payments and credit the correct customer's account. Similarly an informal person-to-person transaction can attach a number short enough to be communicated verbally or on paper. Finally multiple payments with the same ID # can be merged together in wallet UI's, allowing merge-avoidance to be conveniently used with stealth addresses. To avoid accidental collision such payment #'s should be at least 64-bits; to avoid privacy loss the encoded size should be the same for all users. Thus we pick 64-bits or 8-bytes. In addition for the purposes of CoinJoin and multiple outputs it would be desirable for all stealth-using outputs the option of sharing a single 33-byte ephemeral pubkey. Thus our OP_RETURN output becomes: OP_RETURN { ... } Of course, this can't be accomodated within the existing 40-byte, one OP_RETURN per tx, IsStandard() rules, something which is already causing issues w/ Dark Wallet when users try to send to multiple stealth addresses at once, and when multiple stealth sends are CoinJoin'd together. 1) "Merge avoidance", Dec 11th 2013, Mike Hearn, https://medium.com/@octskyward/merge-avoidance-7f95a386692f