The under is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1182: “BDK plans to add BIP47 support.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
This is very encouraging to see; the team working on the Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK) seem as if they are going to merge in support for BIP47, which would allow wallet developers who are building their wallets leveraging the BDK to easily implement reusable payment codes. This would allow bitcoin users to interact with each other in a more private way by enabling users to receive via a static payment code that does not reveal the actual address a UTXO ends up in.
To date (and to the best of my knowledge), the only popular wallet to enable BIP47 has been Samourai Wallet. Recently, there has been a surge in interest for more wallets to begin implementing this feature. Historically, BIP47 has been controversial because many developers think that if BIP47 gets wide adoption it will bloat the chain and drive fees higher due to the amount of data needed to create the payment codes via OP_RETURN. As fees have remained low for an extended period of time and bitcoiners seek out better privacy tools as authoritarian governments like Canada seem keen on using their financial systems to execute political witch hunts, it seems that many are more than comfortable with this tradeoff that comes with BIP47.
The great thing about the BDK staff including BIP47 assist is that it ought to make it simpler for a variety of wallets to implement the fee codes with out having to construct it from scratch. It shall be attention-grabbing to see what number of wallets start implementing BIP47 as soon as assist is formally merged into the BDK. And whether or not or not they do it shortly. At the very least, the market will get some very intriguing perception into how this function impacts the chain at scale if it will get materials adoption. Best case state of affairs is that it considerably will increase the power for customers to transact extra privately utilizing many various wallets and it would not have an effect on the chain state an excessive amount of due to the charge market performing as a forcing operate (as charges go greater people change into much less incentivized to create transactions with OP_RETURN information included).
We will maintain you freaks up to date as this progresses.
