somewhat recently cake wallet added silent payment support to their bitcoin wallet. I don’t ever use bitcoin so I was unaware of the tech until then. it seems to work similarly to monero’s remote node scanning & is said to enhance privacy.
im wondering how it weighs against moneros privacy protections & what this development may or may not mean for the project in the future. im worried about the way it may overshadow XMR due to bitcoins reach & possible consequences if it is inferior tech (being based on a transparent L1 & all). however it is also a big step towards closing the gap between the privacy coin community & the BTC maxis (which is probably only good for eveyone involved). so im feeling split & figured i would ask the community what they think of the development.
it seems to be more like hiding coins in different addresses while obscuring it on chain & using some clever math to make the UX better. aswl as not giving over ur key to the remote node. although Ill admit the technical stuff is slightly about my head so please correct my explanation as needed haha.
im more so wondering about the practical use/implications when it comes to privacy & was struggling to find a good comparison online.
You are accurate: you “hide” coins in different addresses which are only know to the receiver and the sender, I cannot paste a SP address in a block explorer and find what addresses belong to it, and what is the total balance of this BTC user. I can however send a payment to it and then have a “watch” on this entity, there is no obscuring happening on-chain so usual heuristics like when a coin is spent, to where, how much is change, etc still apply.
Which also means if they spend many SP payments together, they reveal to me & others all the addresses belonging to them and what the total balance was, you can think of it like if bitcoin users sent their BTC addresses to each other via DMs, but it removes the interactivity step from handling new addresses, while adding the scanning requirement so the receiver can also know which addresses were generated to them without having to ask senders each time
It is a good feature to have in general in my opinion, but definitely does not come any close to competing with Monero still