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As per BIP 141, the witness Merkle root hash is stored in a scriptPubkey field of a coinbase transaction output with a header consisting of the 4-byte string 0xaa21a9ed. What is the reasoning behind choosing this string?

Googling only yielded a reference to namecoin on a bitcoin-dev IRC log.

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It's random.

The intent was choosing something long enough to avoid having someone accidentally create an output that matches, but short enough that it doesn't unnecessarily makes SegWit blocks larger.

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  • Why was it not chosen to be some regular 4-byte string like all zeros or all ones or 0xAABBCCDD? Will the probability of someone creating a null data output which matches the header increase if the header had some regular structure?
    – sarva
    Sep 10, 2017 at 6:03

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