BIP 47 (Payment Codes)

BIP-47 ("Reusable Payment Codes") defines a system where a receiver publishes one long-term payment code, and senders derive fresh on-chain addresses from it for each payment. The goal: avoid address reuse while still having a single, shareable identifier.

How it worked:

1. The receiver publishes their payment code (an extended public key plus some metadata, encoded as a string starting with PM...).
2. The sender does a one-time notification transaction on-chain: a tiny payment to a special derivation that "introduces" the sender to the receiver and exchanges the cryptographic material needed for ECDH-based address derivation.
3. From that point forward, both parties can derive a stream of unique addresses for payments between them, without further on-chain handshakes.

In practice, BIP-47 saw limited adoption. The Samourai Wallet team championed it; a handful of other wallets implemented it. Two main reasons it didn't take off broadly:

• The notification transaction is a privacy leak in itself. It tells chain observers "this user is using payment codes," and links the sender and receiver via that single on-chain transaction. The whole point was supposed to be privacy.
• The infrastructure burden. Each receiver needed to scan the chain for incoming notification transactions, then derive and watch all the corresponding addresses.

The modern successor is Silent Payments (BIP-352, 2023), which achieves the same "one reusable code, fresh addresses per payment" goal without any notification transaction. As of 2026, BIP-47 is mostly of historical interest; new wallets adopting reusable receive codes are picking Silent Payments instead.