Author: Ruben Somsen 2022-10-03 23:41:10
Published on: 2022-10-03T23:41:10+00:00
Ruben Somsen shared a clarification on the function of the identifier in bitcoin addresses, which is to distinguish why someone paid you. The payments that appear on-chain are still unlinkable by third-party observers and they're unable to tell which identifier was used. In cases where you don't want people to know that you're the same entity, the identifier is insufficient and you'll need a completely separate Silent Payment address. Ruben also expanded on his scheme for allowing multiple silent addresses per wallet with minimal overhead, where the resulting address can be recognizably marked, enabling the recipient to distinguish between different payment purposes. The scheme involves adding a public identifier f to a key when tweaking. F becomes crucial for recovering from backup, and it needs to be communicated to the sender somehow, perhaps as part of the address format.The address has a new field called identifier, which tells the receiver and sender how to set the address correctly. If the receiver doesn't know which identifiers have been used, the wallet can scan all identifiers from 0 to 99. Only 100 different identifiers per wallet are currently allowed, but this limit can be increased at any time in the future. SP addresses are not script-related and may eventually include any additional information needed, such as an expiration timestamp or block height. A new RPC has also been implemented to retrieve silent addresses, which allows users to assign different labels to different addresses, so the user knows which silent address the UTXO came from. A step-by-step tutorial has been written for reference.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T21:30:09.793138+00:00