Silent payments lets you publish a static payment address, and no observer can see any payments made to it. You need the private key to see your payments. This means no more address reuse, no more having to generate new addresses for payments. No more looking up wallet balances on block explorers. Huge UX and privacy boost for Bitcoin.
A softfork does not violate the rules of the network though, that is the difference between a soft fork and hard fork. Miners are free to choose what software to run the same as any other network participant. If a minority of hash power doesn't follow it, the majority chain will always overtake the minority fork. So any miners that don't follow it will lose a lot of money.
The segwit2x attackers were stopped by the community not explicitly running segwit2x nodes, but remaining on the status quo Bitcoin Core nodes. How would that help in the case where attackers are enabling a soft fork that is invisible to status quo Bitcoin Core nodes?
They've been cultivating relationships with mining pools. If they convince a supermajority of hash power to run their patch (unfortunately not very many entities), how will they be stopped?
I blame JavaScript
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They're not trying, they're doing?
Amethyst is going inbox, outbox, dmbox, private box, search box, local box and your mama box. Hope you like it.
https://video.nostr.build/0bcce8552b1958c36c651d235d0aebdae71be3e70ba3784f628265c86f321f34.mp4
Your mama likes it.
This makes it impossible for anyone other than the sender to see any payments to the silent payment address. So you and I could both pay the same publicly posted silent payment address and we would never know about the other payment, and it would not be possible to look it up on a block explorer either.
The sender can find out the real address on send, because they are the ones who create the output. But they can't see any other sends to the silent payment address from any other sender. And no, nobody else can figure out any other payments to the recipient without the recipient's private key.
I don't think any new onion routing network bolted on to the Bitcoin network will be able to be more reliable than Tor or I2P with decades of research and development. Not to mention that Tor and I2P exist today and dandelion is vaporware that will never realistically be built.
That's not exactly true though, your node and the peer you anonymously connect to can both be clearnet for Tor. You just need a tor proxy available to your node and it can route it through an exit node.
Similar for I2P, except the peer must be behind I2P as well.
It breaks all heuristics if used today for any transactions sent with it. For dandelion, you need many peers running it to hide in an anonymity set.
It offloads the onion routing to Tor and I2P, two of the best anonymity networks to achieve an even better level of privacy. Building out a Bitcoin specific onion routing network using a parallel mempool is a fool's errand and will not be able to achieve the same results as the best researched and developed networks built specifically for anonymity.
> A supernode [...] can establish where a transaction was first seen in the peer-to-peer network, ergo ascribe whom a transaction belongs to.
It completely removed this ability of the supermodel, whereas with dandelion the supernode still has at least one peer it can ascribe ownership to. So it is even better than dandelion.
How do you think it falls short of achieving the same thing?