Jun 10, 2022
In this episode of Bitcoin,
Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost welcome
Ruben Somsen back on the show to talk about a recent proposal of
his called “Silent Payments”.
Silent Payments resemble earlier ideas like Stealth
Addresses and Reusable Payment Codes, in that they allow users to
publish a static “address”, while this is not the actual Bitcoin
address they will be paid on. Instead, senders of a transaction can
use this static address to generate new Bitcoin addresses for the
recipient, for which the recipient — and only the recipient — can
in turn generate the corresponding private keys.
Like Stealth Addresses and Reusable Payment Codes,
the benefit of Silent Payments is that addresses can be posted
publicly without harming users’ privacy; snoops cannot link the
publicly posted address to the actual Bitcoin addresses that the
recipient is paid on. Meanwhile, unlike Stealth Addresses and
Reusable Payment Codes, Silent Payments do not require any
additional blockchain data— though this does come at a
computational cost for the recipient.
The podcast episode details all this in roughly two
parts. In the first half of the episode, Ruben, Aaron and Sjors
break down how Silent Payments work, and in the second half of the
episode they discuss how Silent Payments compare to Stealth
Addresses and Reusable Payment Codes, as well as some potential
implementation issues.