Silent Payments

Silent payments are a bitcoin privacy protocol, specified in BIP 352 and finalized in 2024, that lets a recipient publish a single static address while every payment to it lands at a unique, unlinkable address on-chain. Donations, tips, and recurring payments can therefore share one public identifier without the transactions being connectable by observers.

Why it matters

Address reuse is among the most damaging privacy mistakes in bitcoin: a donation address printed on a website accumulates a public, permanent list of every supporter and amount. The traditional fixes either require the recipient to hand out fresh addresses interactively or, as with earlier reusable payment codes, involve extra on-chain notification transactions that cost fees and leave their own traces. Silent payments remove the interaction entirely, making private static addresses practical for the first time without a server or notification step.

How it works

The sender combines their own private key with the recipient's published key through a shared-secret computation, deriving a one-time Taproot address that only the recipient can recognize and spend from. Nothing on-chain links the payment to the static address. The cost falls on the recipient, whose wallet must scan candidate transactions and attempt the same computation to detect incoming funds, heavier work than checking a fixed address list, which is why early support concentrated in wallets willing to bear the scanning burden.