Silent Payments

Silent Payments is a Bitcoin proposal that lets a recipient publish a single, static public key or address once, while every sender who pays that recipient automatically generates a fresh, cryptographically unique receiving address for that specific payment — all without any direct interaction or communication needed between sender and recipient beforehand. The recipient can then independently scan the blockchain and detect each payment made to them using their own private key, even though each payment went to a different-looking address.

This directly addresses the address reuse (see Kaavon's "Address Reuse" glossary definition) problem common with static, published receiving addresses, without requiring the back-and-forth coordination that avoiding address reuse would otherwise demand — since every incoming payment ends up at a unique address automatically, outside observers can't easily link multiple payments made to the same recipient together just by watching the chain. Silent Payments specifically targets simple, non-interactive address reuse avoidance, complementing rather than replacing other Bitcoin privacy techniques like CoinJoin (see Kaavon's dedicated glossary entry) that address different privacy leaks.