Silent Payments: The upgrade Bitcoin can’t afford to ignore | Opinion
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While Bitcoin (BTC) may have started out with the perception of “anonymous internet money,” the reality of Bitcoin being transparent-by-design has finally started to take hold in the space. While Bitcoin offers powerful censorship-resistance and decentralization in theory, a lack of accessible privacy features drastically limits its effectiveness in harsher environments. Political dissidents seeking funding, journalists accepting donations, and whistleblowers raising support have all started to realize that Bitcoin is actually the world’s most efficient and largest financial surveillance system, mapping who paid whom, when, and how much.
Imagine for a moment that anytime you entered your credit card number online or shared your Venmo info with a friend, that person could simply Google your info and learn when you had received money, how much you get paid, and where you spend your hard-earned money. That nightmare scenario is a reality for most users of Bitcoin today, but thankfully, there are brilliant minds working to make privacy great again on Bitcoin.
Silent payments ‘address’ the problem
In 2022, a legendary Bitcoin developer and researcher named Ruben Somsen made a startling proposal out of nowhere: what if we could bring the same level of privacy when receiving Bitcoin as people expect, all without any changes to Bitcoin itself? This concept was quickly named ‘Silent Payments’ and is a new address type for Bitcoin that allows you to create a single, static address to share with friends, use for donations, or post for tips without sacrificing privacy.
When someone wants to send you a payment, they use the unique public key that is a part of your Silent Payment address, combine it with the public keys of the outputs they want to send, and generate a unique, one-time address that looks on-chain just like any other regular Bitcoin payment. While the concept of a “stealth address” has existed in Bitcoin for many years, all previous attempts had deep flaws that greatly limited the user experience or privacy offered. Silent Payments are stealth addresses, perfected.
Silent Payments beautifully addresses the most prevalent privacy issues when receiving Bitcoin, all while actually simplifying the experience and getting Bitcoin much closer to that Venmo-like dream. All any Bitcoin user needs now is one address that never changes, and they can easily receive Bitcoin while preserving their privacy and that of the sender, anytime, any day. Even better, we can now use these Silent Payment addresses to build out powerful username systems like CashApp’s CashTags, all without a trusted middleman or a loss of privacy! Better privacy meets better user experience.
Silent Payments are here, but adoption is not
Like any new technology, the most pressing issue for Silent Payments is now education and adoption. While wallets like Cake Wallet have led the way in empowering their users to leverage Silent Payments since 2024, wallet adoption has been slow on the uptake. Many wallets and companies have signaled their support for the concept of Silent Payments, but most are waiting on upstream libraries to add native support and simplify the integration process.
In the meantime, however, many wallets have already started to support the simplest part of Silent Payments—allowing you to send to a Silent Payments address, but not allowing you to receive to one. This is far easier from an integration standpoint and is rapidly gaining adoption. Once a few other major wallets in the space take the time to enhance their users’ privacy through Silent Payments, a snowball effect of adoption will make this upgrade to Bitcoin’s privacy unstoppable.
The sooner we can get away from the broken paradigm of constantly-rotating Bitcoin addresses and shattered privacy expectations, the faster we can grow the number of people experiencing freedom money like never before. The adoption of Silent Payments is inevitable, but you can help speed up the progress of Bitcoin like never before simply by asking your favorite wallet to implement Silent Payment support today!
Privacy: Choose it or lose it
Unlike many promising privacy improvements to Bitcoin, Silent Payments requires no code changes to the Bitcoin project, has no impact on fees, and doesn’t need any costly rough consensus. It’s time that we choose to reclaim our privacy each time we use Bitcoin, transaction by transaction, through the power of Silent Payments. We cannot normalize our finances being transparent to the world if we want to continue to preserve human freedom.
This oversharing needs to end and can end…silently.
