Silent Payments for Bitcoin using Sparrow Wallet | Major privacy upgrade!

本站添加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Address reuse with Bitcoin has been a problem for a very long time. And silent payments is a way to solve that issue.

[00:00:08]With the way Bitcoin works, you're not supposed to reuse addresses because each time you do that and you send to somebody else or to an exchange or anything like that, you are linking all of those people and those transactions and all that information to that address that you are reusing. So, silent payments, the way it works is you are able to have a static address and when somebody sends Bitcoin to that static address, the silent payment system creates a new address for you behind the scenes. So, it creates a lot of additional privacy. This is slowly being rolled out to a few different wallets.

[00:00:45]There's Blue Wallet that has this.

[00:00:46]There's Cake Wallet that has this. Those are both software wallet options. And there is now Sparrow that has this. So, I'm going to show you how to do this in Sparrow, which you can connect to your hardware wallet. There's a few things that need to be worked out. Still, there needs to be uh a lot more uh going on with this space for it to become more universally accepted and usable. So, I'm going to show you how to do that. But first, I'm going to introduce myself. My name is Forest Total. I'm a Bitcoin educator and I help people in one-on-one sessions make sure that they have the best Bitcoin security best practices as well as helping them with inheritance, multic, anything Bitcoin related. I am basically Bitcoin tech support and you can reach out to me through the link in my description. It's path to bitcoin.xyz.

[00:01:31]I also run the Bitcoin Masters Learning Community where I have some exclusive courses and it's a good way to meet some other Bitcoiners. So, another quick note here is you do need to be using the newest version of Sparrow. This is 2.5 and this is the version that supports silent payments. Okay, so here we have Sparrow. This is my version of Sparrow here. This is a test wallet I have. I am connected to my own node and this is kind of one of the issues that we'll get into. Uh, again, this is being worked out. There needs to be other infrastructure built out to really make this more and more usable. But what we're going to do today is we're going to set up a software wallet just for ease of demonstration, but the same thing would apply with your hardware wallet. So, if you're already familiar with Sparrow, you can export your uh hardware wallet and then just start at the next step that we're going to go to here. So, the first step is is to uh create a new wallet. We're going to name this uh silent payments or just SP and we're going to create wallet. Now, this is where you need to change some things.

[00:02:35]So, we're going to keep it a single signature, but this we don't want an HD wallet, a hierarchical deterministic wallet. We want a silent payment wallet.

[00:02:44]So, single signature silent payment.

[00:02:47]This is going to immediately change our script type to tap routt. And then we are going to either connect a hardware wallet, an airgapped wallet, or create a new one. We're just going to create a new software wallet in this case. Just going to simply create a 12word seed phrase here. And we're going to generate a new one here. and we're just going to use this for demonstration purposes.

[00:03:06]Okay, so I've created that. We're going to confirm backup. We're going to re-enter these words. All right, so now let's create this key store. We're going to use the default uh derivation path here. We're going to press import keys store. And we can see this information here. We can see uh the master fingerprint. We're going to press apply.

[00:03:26]Now we're going to do no password.

[00:03:28]Again, this is just for test purposes.

[00:03:30]So if we go here, we can scan for transactions. We'll try, but we have again an error loading transactions. So my server, the one that I use with my own node. This does not support silent payments. So you need to use a server, an Electrum server that's been built out by the same people that built out Sparrow, Craig Raw. And uh right now, that's pretty difficult to do. There's no sort of plug-and-play option to be able to do that with Umbrell or Start 9.

[00:03:59]I imagine that will be built out soon.

[00:04:01]So, we either need to run that and figure out how to do that, which again is difficult and beyond the scope of this specific video, but uh maybe if it there's enough demand for it, I could do that. Uh so, we're going to go to settings. We're going to go to server.

[00:04:14]We're going to edit existing connection.

[00:04:16]We're going to go to our public server here. And if we click this downward arrow here, these are the public servers. And this is the newest one right here that says support silent payments. We're going to press test connection. All right. And we are connected.

[00:04:32]And now it will load transactions for silent payments. So what's going to be different now is if we go to the receive tab, this looks quite a bit different than it used to. We can see this address type is different. So we have SP1 is how it's starting. So with the SegWit address, it's going to start with BC1Q.

[00:04:50]Tap routt is BC1P.

[00:04:53]This one is starting SP1. Uh so we're going to copy this address and we're going to send some Bitcoin to this address and uh we're going to need to use a wallet that is compatible with sending to silent payments. So right here I'm in CoinOs. This is a CoinOs wallet. This is largely compatible with all sorts of things. It has liquid, lightning, bolt 12, all this really great stuff. Has ecash as well. However, when you type this in, it says unrecognized input. So, even this wallet that is universally uh very compatible across the board does not support silent payments. So, we're going to have to use a wallet that does. We're going to try Blue Wallet. So, I'm actually going to bring Blue Wallet up. I have 5,000 Satoshi's in there and I'm going to send this to the silent payment address just so we can see what is happening. We're going to scan the QR code on the screen here and we're going to put in the full amount of Bitcoin. So, it's saying to and there is a BC1P.

[00:05:59]Uh, this is the taproot address, but it is derived from the silent payment. So, we're going to send now. All right. So, we have received the Bitcoin. We have it unconfirmed here. We can look it up on the transaction ID. We go to addresses.

[00:06:14]We have it here in this address. Uh, we have a UTXO. Now, let's take a look at the uh let's view the transaction. All right. So here we go. Uh this is what it looks like. It is going from a SegWit to a BC1 uh P so to a tap routt address.

[00:06:34]And we'll see if these match. That worked. Right, we have this address that was derived from the uh silent payment address that uh stayed the same. Now what I want to do here to really test this out and show how this is working is I'm going to use a different wallet. I'm going to use Cake Wallet and I'm going to send to this silent payment address again, which has stayed exactly the same as it was for Blue Wallet, but it shouldn't put it into the same address.

[00:07:03]It should create a brand new one. So, Cake Wallet is another wallet that supports it. I have again 5,000 BTC in here. I'm going to press send. I'm going to scan the QR code on Sparrow and it has selected the silent payment address.

[00:07:19]I'm going to put in the max amount of Bitcoin. I'm going to put my fee uh as medium here and we're going to do uh max transaction sent. We have a full transaction here coming in. If we go to addresses, you can see both of these are different. So even though I sent to the same static address, it ended up sending to different addresses on the other side. We have two UTXOs now. So, this is basically solving the issue of always needing to grab a new address, of always worrying about having people send more to that same address. So, this is actually fixing a major issue in my opinion. So, we have a confirmed transaction, we have an unconfirmed transaction. Last thing I want to do here is show that you can send Bitcoin out of this to a nonsilent address.

[00:08:14]We're going to go to my cold uh card test wallet here. We're going to put this in. We're going to go from silent payment test and we're going to copy this address.

[00:08:27]We're going to paste it in here. We'll go to pay 2. Again, this is a BC1Q. This is just a regular Segwid address. Test out to cold card. We're going to go max.

[00:08:38]This is also another update from the uh newest version of Sparrow that allows you to do sub1ap for vbbyte transactions. So that could be something that some people want. Uh let's just do let's do uh you know uh 64 sats per vite. We're going to create the transaction here. We're going to finalize transaction and we're going to sign it and we'll broadcast the transaction. Let's copy this transaction ID. You can see it has shown and indicated that it has left this one here and it has been received over here unconfirmed. So going to meool.space uh we'll look at it in here because I did a sub one sap pervite and there it is the two tap routt addresses have combined into one seg that I now have in cold storage. So this is a massive improvement and I think that this could begin replacing uh the current system that we have with hierarchical deterministic wallets where there is an issue of address reuse. This does create a little bit of ease, a little less friction and more simplicity. It also allows for the use of onchain bitcoin as a receiving method for payment on say a website. You could put this address, the silent payment address on there and it's always going to derive and create a new address and limit the privacy concerns that are associated with it. So if somebody donated to that address online, they can see where it ended up in the taproot address that was derived from the silent payment address, but they can't see everybody else doing that.

[00:10:17]Whereas if you put just a static SegWit address up there or even just a normal Taproot address up there and if you had a bunch of people donate to it, they could all see all the different wallet histories leading to those payments um because they're now involved in that. So it it does become a privacy concern. So, this is a big upgrade in my opinion and I really hope that uh a lot more wallets adopt this as it is fairly limited with uh the three that I talked about. There might be a couple more too uh just from a a quick search online. Those were the three that I found is now Sparrow, which is great because it's not a software wallet or you can use it as a non-software wallet. And then the other two being Blue and Cake Wallet. So, hopefully this was interesting.

[00:11:04]Hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully, you got something out of this. And um again, if you want some additional help, you can hire me for a one-on-one. If you want to join the best online learning community around Bitcoin, join the Bitcoin Masters. And I really just want to thank you guys for watching these videos. Everything you do around that helps support this channel, helps support me to continue to make these videos and hiring me and joining and using all the links in the description.

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