Silent payments update: Recap: bitcoin addresses are both - a usability failure - a privacy failure You hand someone an ugly long text like bc1p9fua296p3vpwldwtz0cxnfhs3efzt094fg76mccmp5lllmgl66qq9c9375 🤢. If its reused, or posted somewhere public, anyone can see everything ever paid to that address, terrible privacy. So wallets hand out a fresh address each time, and now the person paying you has to keep asking for a new one, terrible usability. Imagine having to recreate an email address everytime someone wants to send you an email else everyone can see all the emails you received to that email, it's absurd. Silent payments fix both at once. You publish one address, once, forever. Every payment to it lands on a different output that only you can find. - Nobody can link them to each other or to you - nobody ever has to ask you for a new address again The catch is that nobody can find your money for you. Your wallet has to search the chain itself. That is the reason this is not on your phone yet (aka silent payments light client) Everyone assumed that search meant downloading around 15 GB. Nobody had measured it. So I measured all of it. Every one of the 255,434 blocks since taproot activated (which is the relevant part). It is 3 GB, if the server skips coins that were already spent (cut-through). No server does that today. The code now exists. These measurements got featured in Optech newsletter 422, now updated. I run one of the few independent full indexes for this. Every six hours it also publishes a fingerprint of everything it serves to Nostr, so if it ever changes its story, anyone can prove it. No other silent payments server does that.