Adjoining the new feature of Silent Payment on Bitcoin Blockchain would add one more protective layer of privacy over transactions.
Ruben Somsen has come up with the idea of ‘Silent Payments’ that would make transactions on the bitcoin blockchain more private and under control. A recent proposal from Somsen is quite interesting that would add more privacy of bitcoin at the recipient end through Silent Payments.
Similar to concepts like BIP47, this feature of silent payment in the bitcoin ecosystem would allow users to create payment codes that are reusable and can also be tweaked by other individuals if they want to create their unique public addresses. Additionally, only the sender and receiver would be aware of these addresses. This is how receivers would accept bitcoin payments more privately rather than xpub exposing or reusing a single address to receive payments using Silent Payment.
The person who has this proposal of Silent Payments, Ruben Somsen, is quite a popular name related to the bitcoin industry. He founded Seoul Bitcoin Meetup in February 2014, which is the longest-running crypto meetup in Korea. Along with this, Somsen is Education Director at Reading Bitcoin and author of Statechains, a layer-2 scaling protocol intended to enhance the Lighting Network. Suggestion of silent payments from such a person having vast knowledge of bitcoin is considerable.
Earlier mentioned, BIP47 is a concept of increased data usage tradeoff exactly as a reusable address, like proposed Silent Payments. In this way, it enables OP_Return messages that need more data than an average bitcoin transaction. Now the feature of a tradeoff with Silent Payment, this BIP47 tradeoff where extra data is associated with payment code’s creation that uses OP_Return, will be eliminated and replaced by an increase in requirements for scanning wallet software.
So what is happening here is that the receiver provides a silent payment public address to the senders and uses the input’s private key. This will be used to send bitcoin to the receiver to create a receiver-owned public address and send bitcoin to the address. Then the receiver would need to scan the blockchain to get the inputs and data associated with the address of silent payments for identification of the recipient address. On 24th May 2022, someone initiated the first-ever silent payments transaction using the bitcoin testnet, Signet.
This tradeoff including silent payments would be interesting in many ways as it would reduce a huge load of long-term data on operators with full nodes in bitcoin ecosystem. But this would happen only when adopted in favor of BIP47 enabled solutions; however, this would require building wallet software buy-in so that the products would be Silent Payments scheme compatible.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while pursuing his post-graduation major in blockchain development. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing, along with coding. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing skills, and a reliable craft at explaining the concepts such as blockchain programming, languages and token minting. He also frequently shares technical details and performance indicators of ICOs and IDOs.