0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Lumor 16 May \ on: All you need to know about Silent Payments in one site | silentpayments.xyz bitcoin
I thought the receiver had to scan all transactions/UTXOs since they created the wallet to figure out if they received something?
The difference is that you don't need separate infra just to generate new addresses for every user, but of course you still need a back-end to sync your wallet, just like any other Bitcoin wallet.
In the future this will likely just be an extension of Fulcrum/Electrum as there are already forks that add Silent Payment sync to these in a privacy-preserving way, meaning a Silent Payments user could sync using a public remote node without sacrificing privacy, thus requiring no infra.
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That's true. From the website
Tradeoffs
Because Bob cannot pre-generate addresses with silent payments, he needs to keep checking to find new payments from the point he generated the payment code. Because this scanning is relatively costly, Silent Payments require more compute and bandwidth when scanning than a standard Electrum-style server. The average Bitcoin wallet today will have to connect to a new type of server that serves the necessary “tweak” data for a wallet to check each potential transaction for themselves.
The key difference with Silent Payment scanning is that instead of pre-generating a large amount of addresses up front like with a standard BIP 32 light client, Silent Payments requires the wallet to download 33 bytes of data per potential output and then perform an ECDH calculation to check if it is owned by the user. The major benefit to this approach is that it provides excellent privacy (even for light wallets) as the wallet back-end does not know what outputs belong to any light client.
Even though this may sound like a major hit to user experience, thankfully we can already drastically improve sync performance by ruling out potential outputs like:
Non-Taproot outputs Taproot dust outputs <=1000sats (~85% of > Taproot outputs right now) All potential Silent Payments outputs spent since you last scanned Additionally, there are many brilliant people working on reducing the impact of this tradeoff through things like transaction cut-through, Silent Payments-specific indexes in Bitcoin Core, and much more.
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Yeah, although Ruben Somsen usually does not oversell it when he talks about this invention of his. He acknowledges this limitation. Yet, this increase in bandwidth or computation time is probably not a concern for someone who really needs to keep his payments silent ;)
PR styles differ...
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I can imagine Ruben would keep it real.
Classic @sethforprivacy setting up people to become disappointed with Bitcoin and switch to Monero. /jk ;D Very nice work overall, except for the server salesmanship.
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