Stealth Address
A privacy approach letting a receiver share a single stealth pubkey, generating fresh addresses for each payment. Not standard in Bitcoin.
Stealth addresses are a privacy primitive: the receiver publishes a single long-term public key, and senders derive a fresh on-chain address for each payment from that key. The receiver scans the chain for outputs that match their key and finds the payments without ever publishing a static receive address.
The cryptographic idea has existed in Bitcoin discussions since 2014 but never made it into the base protocol. The reasons:
- Receiver-side scanning is expensive. To find your payments, you must check every transaction on the chain against your stealth key. This is doable for a server with the full chain available, but awkward for light wallets and bandwidth-constrained users.
- Two-way handshake variants (like BIP-47 Payment Codes) require a "notification" transaction that itself reveals you're using payment codes - which leaks a different kind of metadata.
Monero builds stealth addresses into its protocol by default. Bitcoin has historically left them to wallet-level conventions and BIP-47, which had limited adoption.
The modern revival is Silent Payments (BIP-352, 2023), which refines the stealth-address idea to work cleanly with Bitcoin's existing Taproot infrastructure. Silent Payments is the stealth-address concept that's actually shipping in 2026 wallets.
See Silent Payments for the practical 2026 version of this idea.
Key takeaways
- Generates new addresses under the hood from a single pubkey
- Improves privacy but needs constant chain scanning by the receiver
- Mostly overshadowed by BIP 47 or other advanced privacy proposals