somewhat recently cake wallet added silent payment support to their bitcoin wallet. I don't ever use bitcoin so I was unaware of the tech until then. it seems to work similarly to monero's remote node scanning & is said to enhance privacy.

im wondering how it weighs against moneros privacy protections & what this development may or may not mean for the project in the future. im worried about the way it may overshadow XMR due to bitcoins reach & possible consequences if it is inferior tech (being based on a transparent L1 & all). however it is also a big step towards closing the gap between the privacy coin community & the BTC maxis (which is probably only good for eveyone involved). so im feeling split & figured i would ask the community what they think of the development.

it seems to be more like hiding coins in different addresses while obscuring it on chain & using some clever math to make the UX better. aswl as not giving over ur key to the remote node. although Ill admit the technical stuff is slightly about my head so please correct my explanation as needed haha.

im more so wondering about the practical use/implications when it comes to privacy & was struggling to find a good comparison online.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

This is a good overview of how silent payment work, thank you for posting it. I learned some new things!

but L2s are often centralized and cannot withstand governmental pressure

This is true on other networks but not true of Bitcoin (lightning). Lightning is even more decentralized than L1 is, you can run a lightning node on an android phone.

it is more about culture and a lack of demand from the Bitcoin community.

Absolutely agree with this, but the culture has been changing. Auditability of supply of coin has been the major hurdle privacy wise, but even with keeping that there are some major changes that can be made to improve privacy. It's a common topic at Bitcoin conferences now, everybody knows this is the direction Bitcoin needs to move in (and has been moving in).

[–] kenkenken 1 points 5 months ago

Lighting is a different thing. And I write more about rollups with regular private transactions, like Aztec for example. As rollups are expected/planned on Bitcoin, this will be true and for Bitcoin too. Rollups operators are somehow similar to CoinJoin operators, and we have a nice example of (in)ability for CoinJoin on bitcoin resist pressure. Samourai dev has been arrested. Wasabi just stopped working by their own will.