Silent Payments: A New Era of Mobile Privacy for Bitcoin
Bitcoin's newest mobile privacy feature, Silent Payments, allows users to receive Bitcoin without exposing an obvious chain of payments to their address. This is made possible by a reusable Bitcoin address and a sender using the recipient's public information to derive a fresh Taproot destination.
The recipient's wallet later scans eligible transactions to find the output that belongs to it. However, this process has been difficult for phones due to the size of the data required for scanning, which can reach up to 15.08 GB across the measured history.
A September measurement project reports that a complete BlindBit Oracle v2 scanning feed would require about 8 MB per day near the upper end of its dataset. This suggests that mobile bandwidth may be manageable, but it also highlights a separate risk: a light wallet depends on an indexer to deliver complete scanning data, and an omitted entry can leave a real payment undiscovered.
Wallet developers have shipped different server relationships, including Sparrow Wallet 2.5.0, which added Silent Payments receiving and automatic selection of a public Frigate server. However, wider adoption still depends on a second property: a wallet must be able to detect incomplete history before an incoming payment disappears from its view.
Currently, the project proposes chained commitments to each block's canonical tweak set to create an audit trail and expose later rewriting or equivocation by servers.