Bitcoin's Silent Payments Feature Gets Mobile Privacy Upgrade

Silent Payments, a feature in Bitcoin, has been upgraded to include mobile privacy capabilities. This means that incoming funds can be made completely invisible.

However, this comes with its own set of challenges. The main issue is the size of the data required for the wallet to verify every relevant payment. A recent project measured the dataset and found that it would require about 8 MB per day near the upper end of its range. This suggests that mobile bandwidth may be manageable.

But there's a catch. Light wallets depend on an indexer to deliver complete scanning data, which means they're vulnerable to incomplete or missing data. If one tweak needed for an incoming payment is absent, the wallet will not detect it and the user will remain unaware of the payment.

The project proposes using chained commitments to each block's canonical tweak set to create an audit trail and prevent later rewriting or equivocation. This would expose any discrepancy between two servers that publish commitments.