What are the silent payments and how they can change the way people use Bitcoin

When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by talented loners who challenged giant corporations or even entire nations. Today’s short story is about just such a guy, who just took what big companies are working on (and are still far from the result).

Developer Ruben Somsen described an implementation of a confidential method for the recipient to send a Bitcoin transaction called «Silent payment». Other alternative methods require serious network rebuilding, huge investments, and a lot of time to develop. 

But Somsen has single-handedly created a surprisingly simple method of increasing the security of Bitcoin payments. There are no famous names and millions of investments here, so the media, unfortunately, ignores this interesting research of the talented loner for the time being.

The million-dollar question: is it even possible for a lone introvert like Ruben to be successful in this corporate world?

How does this concern me?

Attempts by various states to track Bitcoin transactions (and other blockchains as well) have intensified. The simplest transaction-tracking solutions are provided by numerous blockchain explorers. But that’s not the real problem.

The really bad thing is that the specialized firms have created sophisticated software suites that professionally spy on blockchain users for the benefit of governments.

Many commercial tools for such spying have appeared in recent years. The most famous of them is Chainalysis — since 2015, it works for the U.S. Federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Other well-known projects that want to make everyone’s life more difficult are Crystal and Elliptic.

Yes, a free community of programmers is writing different sophisticated technologies that are supposed to better hide your transactions. But how slow and time-consuming they make it! 

Fortunately, a simple guy who probably lives in your neighborhood has found a way to solve this problem simply and quickly. This solution makes it possible to significantly increase the confidentiality of transactions here and now. Unfortunately, in the pursuit of the “very-right-solutions”, large projects ignore the findings of individual noname-developers, wasting time and enormous resources to create something incredibly complex.

Can we get some technical details, plz?

The method has already been tested in the Signet (test network) by several independent users. The method seems to work and is incredibly beautiful in its simplicity.

From the technology description:

“Silent Payment is a cryptographic scheme that allows the recipient to publish a public address and the sender to tweak the address, sending coins to a completely unrelated address. The recipient detects payments by verifying mempool, block or UTXO Set transactions. Currently, it is possible to make silent payments on the signet network”.

If this sounds wild to you, but you want to understand, you can find a more popular explanation of the logic behind this method from Martys Bent at this link.