💡 The Plain-English Definition
A stealth address is a privacy technique where the sender generates a unique, one-time Bitcoin address for each payment, using the recipient’s published public key — so the recipient can receive funds privately without visible address reuse, but has to scan the blockchain to find incoming payments.
🤔 But Why Though?
The core privacy problem with reusing a Bitcoin address is that every payment to it is permanently linked on the public blockchain — a complete public record. Stealth addresses were one of the earlier solutions. Instead of reusing a known address, the sender mathematically derives a fresh address from the recipient’s published “stealth” public key (the shareable counterpart to their private key), adding their own random number so it comes out unique. The recipient, who holds the matching private key, scans the blockchain and works out which UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs — discrete chunks of bitcoin) are theirs, by checking whether each output matches an address they could have derived.
The original stealth-address standard was BIP47 (also called PayNyms, implemented in Samourai Wallet and others). BIP47 required an initial “notification transaction” — an on-chain payment to a notification address before any payments could be received. That carried two costs: a privacy cost (it revealed the relationship between the two parties) and a money cost (an extra on-chain fee). The friction held back its adoption. Silent payments (standardised as BIP352 in 2023) are the improved successor: they reach the same privacy goal with no notification transaction at all, because the sender derives the unique address straight from their own transaction inputs. Silent payments are now the preferred approach for what stealth addresses were designed to do.
🌍 The Real-World Analogy
A stealth address is like a mail-forwarding service that gives each sender a different collection address. When someone wants to post you something, the service tells them a unique address generated just for them. You collect all your mail from the service, which knows to forward anything sent to any of your unique addresses. The catch: you have to check the service to know whether anything arrived (scanning the blockchain), whereas a direct address lets you watch continuously with less effort.
⚡ So What?
Stealth addresses (BIP47/PayNyms) still work and are supported in several wallets if you want to use them. But for a new setup focused on privacy for public-facing addresses, silent payments (BIP352) are the better recommendation today — the same privacy benefit, a smoother experience, and no notification transaction. If you’re choosing a privacy tool for receiving bitcoin at a publicly shared address, go straight to silent payments rather than the older stealth-address standard.
