On June 26th, Cake Wallet reported through X Account, which is facing technical issues regarding the functionality of silent payments after version 5.0.1 update. According to the team, the regression of this feature has affected the ability to interrupt synchronization for most users who use it and scan transactions. The company explained that the ruling is not compromising the fund’s safety, but rather compromised the scanning capabilities, and announced that it will allocate more resources to resolve it in the coming days with a patch that can be integrated into the next version 5.1 or a minor launch.
The issue came after Cake Wallet tried to expand this privacy technology to over 600,000 users. The developers realized the solution It’s not as simple as they predicted and apologized for the delayemphasises that the implementation of advanced technologies such as silent payments reported by Cryptootics requires unique challenges. The company also noted that there are updates that do not include modifications, but that they work in parallel in the arrangement.
However, not everyone shares the same analysis of the situation. Users question the feasibility of silent payments in cake wallets, suggesting that technology may face limitations inherent in design or implementation. According to the user, the ideal technical solution was to implement from the beginning a technique included in the Bitcoin improvement proposal called BIP 47. It is called «Reusable Payment Code for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets».
This BIP defines a technique for creating payment codes that are exposed and associated with actual identity, without creating the loss of security or privacy inherent in reusing P2PKH addresses.
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP0047).
The motivations after the creation of BIP 47 are explained as follows: «Payment Codes add ID information to transactions that help interact between merchants and clients while protecting user privacy. They provide the advantages of privacy in the dark wallet type direction to SPV customers without the need for a full trust node, while at the same time significantly reducing their reliance on blockchain storage ».
This improvement proposal is outdated. It began on April 24th, 2015. Last updated on February 15th, 2021. It’s in the final version.
Reusable payment codes were more popular than they were back then, but today they serve as a technical reference for the construction of private payments, and silent payments seem to meet current needs more efficiently.
For example, a BIP 47 style transaction requires you to send a pre-notification transaction. This is defined as sending output to a notification address that contains the built-in payment code. Silent Payments, on the other hand, utilizes information present in Bitcoin transactions to generate unique addresses using public keys and autoderivations. No additional interaction is required.
Silent Payments allow users to receive transactions through reusable addresses, automatically generate unique directions in Bitcoin, maintaining privacy without the need for constant interaction with the issuer. This feature is related to reducing the risk of directional reuse. This is a factor that could expose spending patterns and links between transactions, and pseudo affects the confidentiality of users within a critical network.