No
But it has one thing going for it: it leverages a harder money
Discussion
Thoughts on Bitcoin Silent Payments?
They are neat technology, but it is bad if they make people think it is generally safe to reuse them. It is not. If you use them, you should make a new silent payment address for every service you use, and if it an anonymous service (like a swap service) you should make a new one for each *payment.*
Otherwise you are subject to two attacks:
1. Profiling
A supposedly anonymous service, like a swap service, can create a hidden profile of a user based on the address they send money to. E.g. if I use it twice with the same silent payment address, they can keep a record of that and know that at time A I received $20 and at time B I received $35, because I reused the same silent payment address. Thus they create a hidden profile on me and learn *when* I use their service and *how much* I swap there day to day, which is info they should not know. Mitigating this attack requires creating a new silent payment address for each payment whenever you use an anonymous service like that.
2. The colluding sender attack
This attack also relies on address reuse. In it, two people -- Alice and Bob -- observe that Alice sent $10 to the same silent payment address that Bob sent $5 to. So together they know the same person received at least $15, which they should not know. Ideally, Alice should only know about *her* payment and Bob should only know about *his.* But if I reuse the same address, they can compare notes and learn that both of their payments went to the same person. That's a privacy leak, and to mitigate it, you must not give the same silent payment address to two different people. Make a different one for each such payment.
"You must not give the same silent payment address to two different people." As far as I know, SPs use stealth addresses, so wouldn't that mitigate these types of attacks?
No, stealth addresses do not eliminate the weakness to the profiling attack or the colluding sender attack. Monero addresses and silent payment addresses and bolt12 offers are all weak to these two attacks if reused in the mentioned contexts.
The reason, btw, is because even though the senders *send to* a stealth address, they can log the original silent payment address (or monero address, or bolt12 offer, or in general any reusable payment string) and (1) use that for profiling -- every time someone asks them to send money to it, it's another data point in their profile on that payment string (2) share data with other senders about times when they sent money to that payment string, that way, together, the colluding senders know more than they would know individually