Silent Payments Update (Bitcoin Core Dev Tech, May 2026)

Silent payments (BIP 352) let a recipient publish a single static address from which senders derive unique, unlinkable on-chain addresses, fixing the privacy and usability problems of reusing or repeatedly requesting addresses — and pairing well with BIP353 DNS-based human-readable names, which make publishing a static code practical.

The tradeoffs noted were expensive recipient-side scanning (an elliptic-curve multiplication per transaction) against easier sending (Sparrow has implemented sending; receiving is experimental), retroactive privacy loss in the presence of a relevant quantum computer, and a libsecp256k1 controversy over how many recipient "labels" (used for change and sub-addresses) to support, since one alternative imposes a linear cost increase per additional label. The libsecp256k1 PR is on its fourth iteration and needs review; its test vectors track BIP-352, but there is no security proof yet.