Quote from: odolvlobo on May 28, 2022, 05:49:06 PM

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on May 28, 2022, 01:01:24 PM

Quote from: witcher_sense on May 27, 2022, 05:41:33 AM

7) Silent payments greatly improve the fungibility of bitcoin transactions.

...
You were probably referring to privacy.

Privacy and fungibility are directly related because bitcoins can be discriminated by address and addresses can be associated with people, but I agree that "privacy" is more appropriate.

For cryptocurrencies, privacy and fungibility are practically synonymous: You can’t have either one without the other, and providing either one provides the other.

In practice, a lack of privacy literally means that 1 BTC ≠ 1 BTC.

Quote from: odolvlobo on May 28, 2022, 05:49:06 PM

Anyway, I don't think that this payment method greatly improves privacy because it only removes the need for the receiver to communicate with the sender. If communication is already private, then nothing is gained.

The most important use case for Silent Payments is tip addresses, donation addresses, etc. It is a very common and important use case. This use case has never been solved in Bitcoin; I think that the lack of a solution is a flaw in Bitcoin. Look around this forum at all the tip addresses in people’s signatures—observe all the donation addresses you see in static webpages. These all incur the problems of address reuse. The problem must be solved.

Quote from: LightningResponse on May 30, 2022, 08:58:17 PM

It looks like btc will go closer to what Monero was am I right? The problem I see with that is Monero was limited in growth because of the mass bans probably because of KYC. If Bitcoin implements silent payments to increase privacy (Woo!) would this put us at risk of meeting the same fate as Monero? or are we too big?

Zcash has strictly superior privacy technology, compared to Monero. In the context of discussing strong privacy for Bitcoin (much stronger than Silent Payments), I addressed similar concerns accordingly:

Quote from: death_wish on June 12, 2022, 12:51:36 AM

Quote from: empowering on June 11, 2022, 11:43:29 PM

Feel like BTC has walked that tightrope pretty well......

Not to discuss altcoins in WO, but as raw data for contemplating the hypothetical of a Bitcoin with strong privacy: Gemini supports Zcash shielded withdrawals. That is a NY Bitlicensed, notoriously ultra-KYC exchange, under one of the most onerous regulatory regimes in the world. They started support for shielded withdrawals, after Zcash was hit with some high-profile exchange delistings during a FUDstorm; Tyler Winklevoss made Gemini’s position quite clear. The Rock Trading in Europe is another regulated KYC exchange that supports Zcash shielded.

The exchanges have users’ KYC dox. Police, tax enforcers, et al. can tell targeted persons, “Give us your view keys, or else”; view keys permit viewing, but not spending of shielded money that is otherwise entirely invisible on the blockchain. Gemini or The Rock Trading users who withdraw shielded Zcash are concealing their private finances from the world; they will not end up on any “rich lists”, their finances are protected from snooping by cyberstalkers, and they can sleep quietly at night without worrying about armed robbers. But they are not in any position to hide from their governments. This issue is not as simple as it seems at a glance.

I think that Zcash has walked that tightrope pretty well. Bitcoin could have done similarly—and it could do similarly, in the future.

See Tyler Winklevoss’ above-linked Tweet. Do you suppose that he would renounce Bitcoin, if Bitcoin were to attain better privacy?

Quote from: rlirs on June 01, 2022, 07:39:30 AM

Try it, use a mixer for your bitcoins and sell them on some exchange. Lots of exchanges blacklist bitcoins from mixers.

My exchange never did that. (I use DEX.)