On April 1st of this year, Sparrow Wallet developer Craig Raw announced the launch of Frigate, a server that for the first time demonstrates: silent payment Bitcoin (silent payments) is practical for “mass adoption” on mobile devices.
Craig described the launch as “a solution for creating a crypto wallet.” silent payment It’s easy to operate on mobile devices and is an important step towards privacy.
Frigate is an experimental Electrum server, i.e. Allows wallets to connect to the Bitcoin network without downloading the entire blockchainremotely check your transaction history and status.
The creators of Sparrow Wallet claimed: silent payment These represent the most significant advancement in how Bitcoin wallets obtain addresses since the introduction of HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallets in 2013. The frigate proves such a leap is now technologically feasible, he said. The server is available on GitHub. However, it is still in the experimental stage.
loss silent paymentis Bitcoin’s privacy mechanism that allows for the publication of a single static payment code. Receive funds without revealing your address on the networkdescribed by CriptoNoticias.
A new unique address is automatically generated for each payment. Eliminate address reuse: A privacy flaw identified by Satoshi Nakamoto himself in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. HD wallets, the current industry standard, organized key management but did not solve the problem.
Furthermore, by avoiding address reuse, silent payment It could potentially reduce the risk of future attacks using quantum hardware.
What Frigates Solve
Unlike HD wallets, which retrieve addresses according to a predictable incremental numerical rate, Silent Payments calculates each destination address. Combine specific inputs for each transactionan item that can only be used once.
This guarantees absolute uniqueness, but comes at a cost. To know if someone sent you funds, your wallet must review each transaction in the chain and perform a cryptographic calculation to determine whether it belongs.
Craig said the initial problem arose because the scanning process, in its original form, required downloading gigabytes of data and performing thousands of operations on each block directly on the user’s device. On a mobile phone, it may take an hour to scan several months’ worth of history. That’s actually what happened No wallet can be used anymore silent payment on mobile.
The Frigate repository also explains the second problem in detail. There is no real-time scan of the memory pool (where transactions wait to be included in a block). Users could not confirm whether pending transactions were received by themcaused confusion and uncertainty.
Frigate solves both problems by moving all the work to the server.
How do frigates work?
Your server must be very fast for this transfer to take effect. Frigate accomplishes this by using a graphics processing unit (GPU), a component specialized in performing thousands of mathematical operations in parallel, instead of a central processor (CPU). Scans months of transaction history as posted in the repository From 1 hour to less than 0.5 seconds.
The server supports most chips made in the past decade, including integrated GPUs from Intel and AMD, Apple Silicon, and discrete cards from NVIDIA and AMD. According to the repository, servers with modern hardware can serve thousands of wallets with near-instantaneous synchronization.
he trade off privacy
Frigate is not a perfect privacy solution. For the server to scan for transactions, Customer must provide secret scan key and public expenditure key. The repository makes it clear that these keys are not stored on disk. The server keeps the key in memory only during an active session and destroys it when closing the session.
Craig Raw considers this model to be equivalent to that of traditional public Electrum servers. This model allows HD wallets to share an address with a server to monitor your history. Privacy tolerances do exist, but according to Raw, this is comparable to that of the most widespread standard among LiteBitcoin wallets.
The frigate is not a finished product, but the first technology demonstration to overcome the most mentioned obstacles. silent payment There is a solution.
Privacy in Bitcoin payments is not a solved problem. Address reuse remains the norm for most wallets, and mechanisms to prevent this have traditionally been too expensive or complex for the average user. If Frigate or a similar solution can be adopted, Bitcoin wallets could take the leap forward in privacy that many in the Bitcoin community are craving.
